No abstract

This study aims to determine the risk factors for clinically-significant post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among Chinese medical rescue workers one year after the response to the Wenchuan earthquake on 12 May 2008. A sample of 337 medical workers who performed response work within the first three months of the event completed an online questionnaire, which included information on demographics, social support, the management and organisation of the disaster response, and an assessment of PTSD. Symptoms consistent with PTSD were prevalent in 17 per cent of the rescue workers. Those who developed PTSD symptoms were more likely to have been injured, experienced a water shortage, been disconnected from family and friends during the response, and have passive coping styles and neurotic personalities. Factors that cannot be changed easily, such as personality traits, should be evaluated prior to deployment to ensure that rescue workers at higher risk of PTSD are provided with adequate support before and during deployment.

Warning signs, as a type of safety signs, are widely applied in our daily lives to informing people about potential hazards and prompting safe behavior. Although previous studies have paid attention to the color of warning signs, they are mostly based on surveys and behavioral experiments. The neural substrates underlying the perception of warning signs with different background colors remain not clearly characterized. Therefore, this research is intended to address this gap with event-related potentials (ERPs) technique. Warning signs with three different background colors (i.e., white, yellow, and blue) were used in the experiment. The results showed that the perceptual differences between different warning signs were present in the form of differential ERPs components (P1, N1, P2, N2, and P3) though subjects were not required to explicitly attend to the warning signs.

It was found that possible future nuclear accidents may cause severe radioactive contaminations, which may require radiation exposure control of farm goods to more than 1000 km from places of nuclear accidents.