Carmen Lawrence

Does Place Attachment Predict Wildfire Mitigation and Preparedness? A Comparison of Wildland–Urban Interface and Rural Communities

Wildfires are a common occurrence in many countries and are predicted to increase as we experience the effects of climate change. As more people are expected to be affected by fires, it is important to increase people’s wildfire mitigation and preparation. Place attachment has been theorized to be related to mitigation and preparation. The present study examined place attachment and wildfire mitigation and preparation in two Australian samples, one rural and one on the wildland–urban interface. The study consisted of 300 participants who responded to questionnaires about their place attachment to their homes and local areas, as well as describing their socio-demographic characteristics and wildfire mitigation and preparedness. Hierarchical regression showed that place attachment to homes predicted wildfire mitigation and preparedness in the rural sample but not in the wildland–urban interface sample. The results suggest that place attachment is a motivator for mitigation and preparation only for people living rurally. Reminding rural residents of their attachment to home at the beginning of wildfire season may result in greater mitigation and preparedness. Further research focusing on why attachment does not predict mitigation and preparedness in the wildland–urban interface is needed.

Going with the Grain of Cognition: Applying Insights from Psychology to Build Support for Childhood Vaccination

Childhood vaccination is widely considered to be one of the most successful public health interventions. Yet, the effective delivery of vaccination depends upon public willingness to vaccinate. Recently, many countries have faced problems with vaccine hesitancy, where a growing number of parents perceive vaccination to be unsafe or unnecessary, leading some to delay or refuse vaccines for their children. Effective intervention strategies for countering this problem are currently sorely lacking, however. Here, we propose that this may be because existing strategies are grounded more in intuition than insights from psychology. Consequently, such strategies are sometimes at variance with basic psychological principles and assumptions. By going against the grain of cognition, such strategies potentially run the risk of undermining persuasive efforts to reduce vaccine hesitancy. We demonstrate this by drawing on key insights from cognitive and social psychology to show how various known features of human psychology can lead many intuitively appealing intervention strategies to backfire, yielding unintended and undesirable repercussions. We conclude with a summary of potential avenues of investigation that may be more effective in addressing vaccine hesitancy. Our key message is that intervention strategies must be crafted that go with the grain of cognition by incorporating key insights from the psychological sciences.

Information available from brief visual presentations using two types of report

The effects of the acoustic and structurai similarity of letters on the accuracy of report were studied using two partial report measures. Ss in Group 1 were required to compare two cued letter pairs on an eight-letter array, and to report whether they were the same or different (CJ), while Group 2, in addition to CJ, had also to report the names of the letters comprising the pairs (CR). The data showed that while CR resulted in a decline in accuracy with increasing cue delay, as reported by Sperling, the CJ measure showed an increase in accuracy. Structural similarity of the target pairs increased the difficulty of both CJ and CR reports over the first 100 msec. An interpretation is offered in terms of a structural trace which does not decay, and in which structural features are “sharpened” and exaggerated to enhance the discriminability of the components.