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Yee (2006) found three motivational factors-achievement, social, and immersion-underlying play in massively multiplayer online role-playing games ("MMORPGs" or "MMOs" for short). Subsequent work has suggested that these factors foster problematic or addictive forms of play in online worlds. In the current study, we used an online survey of respondents (N = 252), constructed and also interpreted in reference to ethnography and interviews, to examine problematic play in the World of Warcraft (WoW; Blizzard Entertainment, 2004-2013). We relied on tools from psychological anthropology to reconceptualize each of Yee's three motivational factors in order to test for the possible role of culture in problematic MMO play: (a) For achievement, we examined how "cultural consonance" with normative understandings of success might structure problematic forms of play; (b) for social, we analyzed the possibility that developing overvalued virtual relationships that are cutoff from offline social interactions might further exacerbate problematic play; and (c) in relation to immersion, we examined how "dissociative" blurring of actual- and virtual-world identities and experiences might contribute to problematic patterns. Our results confirmed that compared to Yee's original motivational factors, these culturally sensitive measures better predict problematic forms of play, pointing to the important role of sociocultural factors in structuring online play.

The influence of human aesthetic appreciation of animal species on public attitudes towards their conservation and related decision-making has been studied in industrialized countries but remains underexplored in developing countries. Working in three agropastoralist communities around Amboseli National Park, southern Kenya, we investigated the relative strength of human aesthetic appreciation on local attitudes towards the conservation of wildlife species. Using semi-structured interviewing and free listing (n = 191) as part of a mixed methods approach, we first characterized local aesthetic judgments of wildlife species. With a Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) approach, we then determined the influence of perceiving four species as beautiful on local support for their protection (“rescuing them”), and of perceiving four other species as ugly on support for their removal from the area, while controlling for informant personal and household socioeconomic attributes. Perceiving giraffe, gazelles and eland as beautiful is the strongest variable explaining support for rescuing them. Ugliness is the strongest variable influencing support for the removal of buffalo, hyena, and elephant (but not lion). Both our qualitative and quantitative results suggest that perceptions of ugly species could become more positive through direct exposure to those species. We propose that protected areas in developing countries facilitate visitation by local residents to increase their familiarity with species they rarely see or most frequently see in conflict with human interests. Since valuing a species for its beauty requires seeing it, protected areas in developing countries should connect the people who live around them with the animals they protect. Our results also show that aesthetic appreciation of biodiversity is not restricted to the industrialized world.

Videogame players commonly report reaching deeply "immersive" states of consciousness, in some cases growing to feel like they actually are their characters and really in the game, with such fantastic characters and places potentially only loosely connected to offline selves and realities. In the current investigation, we use interview and survey data to examine the effects of such "dissociative" experiences on players of the popular online videogame, World of Warcraft (WoW). Of particular interest are ways in which WoW players' emotional identification with in-game second selves can lead either to better mental well-being, through relaxation and satisfying positive stress, or, alternatively, to risky addiction-like experiences. Combining universalizing and context-dependent perspectives, we suggest that WoW and similar games can be thought of as new "technologies of absorption"--contemporary practices that can induce dissociative states in which players attribute dimensions of self and experience to in-game characters, with potential psychological benefit or harm. We present our research as an empirically grounded exploration of the mental health benefits and risks associated with dissociation in common everyday contexts. We believe that studies such as ours may enrich existing theories of the health dynamics of dissociation, relying, as they often do, on data drawn either from Western clinical contexts involving pathological disintegrated personality disorders or from non-Western ethnographic contexts involving spiritual trance.

We investigate the relationship between exposure to Hurricanes Katrina and/or Rita and mental health resilience by vulnerability status, with particular focus on the mental health outcomes of single mothers versus the general public. We advance a measurable notion of mental health resilience to disaster events. We also calculate the economic costs of poor mental health days added by natural disaster exposure. Negative binomial analyses show that hurricane exposure increases the expected count of poor mental health days for all persons by 18.7% (95% confidence interval [CI], 7.44-31.14%), and by 71.88% (95% CI, 39.48-211.82%) for single females with children. Monthly time-series show that single mothers have lower event resilience, experiencing higher added mental stress. Results also show that the count of poor mental health days is sensitive to hurricane intensity, increasing by a factor of 1.06 (95% CI, 1.02-1.10) for every billion (U.S.$) dollars of damage added for all exposed persons, and by a factor of 1.08 (95% CI, 1.03-1.14) for single mothers. We estimate that single mothers, as a group, suffered over $130 million in productivity loss from added postdisaster stress and disability. Results illustrate the measurability of mental health resilience as a two-dimensional concept of resistance capacity and recovery time. Overall, we show that natural disasters regressively tax disadvantaged population strata.

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Cheri Smarr-Foster, and Emmy Swisher. We'd also like to thank 444 alumnus (from fall 2011) Scarlett Eisenhauer, now at UCLA, who has stayed engaged with our research and helped with interviews. We acknowledge Colorado State University and its Department of Anthropology for financial and other support for this research, especially for ensuring that all software and equipment in Dr. Snodgrass' Ethnographic Research and Teaching Laboratory (ERTL) ran smoothly and were up-to-date. We also acknowledge support from the U.