Psychological Processes and Personality Factors for an Appropriate Tsunami Evacuation

Abstract

Although various factors related to the environment (perception of earthquake and warning) and knowledge (oral history and scientific knowledge) affect individual differences in evacuation behavior before a tsunami, the roles of psychological processes and personality factors in such relationships are poorly understood. We addressed this research gap by applying hierarchical regression analyses to survey data from survivors of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster. Previously-known contributions of environmental and knowledge factors were mostly replaced by the perception of a tsunami risk and threat, and these background factors were shown to facilitate these psychological processes. Several personality factors directly contributed to voluntary evacuation, particularly leadership and active well-being in the Power to Live scale, and extraversion in the Big Five scale. Overall, these results seem to indicate the need for formulating two independent targets when developing measures to enhance appropriate tsunami evacuation. Facilitation of the perception of a tsunami risk and threat may basically be pursued by developing existing approaches. Addressing the relevant personality factors may be done in a broader context of disaster or general education and sociocultural activities.

Survival-oriented personality factors are associated with various types of social support in an emergency disaster situation

“…In total, 1,412 questionnaires (39%) were anonymously completed and returned by mid-January, 2014. These data have previously been used to construct a "power to live" inventory [45,46] and to analyze the psychological factors of appropriate (i.e., immediate or voluntary) evacuation when avoiding a tsunami [47].…”

“…For example, nearby residents played a major role in encouraging people to evacuate during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and their role in the evacuation has been officially enshrined by a community disaster management body [54]. Interestingly, at the same time, these two characteristics simultaneously promote individuals' immediate voluntary evacuation behaviors to avoid a tsunami when an earthquake has occurred [47]. The balance between individual and community survival may also be relevant to perceived support because this perception is likely to be shared among community members.…”

“…However, because the potential for such behavior is subjective in nature, it was difficult to define objectively and characterize the population accurately. Furthermore, the present analyses did not include various psychological factors associated with tsunami evacuation [47] that might have affected behavior during the evacuation as well as the subsequent provision and receipt of social support. These factors were not included in the present analyses due to the absence of a specific hypothesis; exploratory analyses that included the interactions of all these factors with personality characteristics would have required unrealistically stringent statistical thresholds for the correction of multiple comparisons.…”

Social, Family, and Educational Impacts on Anxiety and Cognitive Empathy Derived From the COVID-19: Study on Families With Children

“…It is obvious that contextual elements play an essential role in anxiety control in situations of social isolation derived from natural, political or health emergencies, as is the case of COVID-19 crisis (Sugiura et al, 2020). In these situations, in addition to the main stressor, that is the crisis itself, authors such as Lock and Gordon (2012), add a series of secondary stressors derived from the family, social, economic, media or educational contexts that can aggravate these anxiety situations.…”

A Concise Psychometric Tool to Measure Personal Characteristics for Surviving Natural Disasters: Development of a 16-Item Power to Live Questionnaire

“…In our normative data, men in their 70s have the highest sum scores of Power to Live ( Supplementary Table S4), but it does not necessarily means this group simply has the highest probability to successfully survive a natural disaster. In fact, our data of the survivors of 2011 earthquake indicate that the ratio of immediate evacuation from the tsunami risk was highest in women in their 30s (see the open-access data from [17]; for more detailed analyses focusing on tsunami survival, see another report from our group [39] in this issue). As we briefly introduced at the beginning of this paper, other factors such as cognitive, physical and socioeconomic ones are known to contribute successful survival in a disastrous situation.…”