Daphne E. Whitmer

Assessing Mental Models of Emergencies Through Two Knowledge Elicitation Tasks

Objective: The goals of this study were to assess the risk identification aspect of mental models using standard elicitation methods and how university campus alerts were related to these mental models. Background: People fail to follow protective action recommendations in emergency warnings. Past research has yet to examine cognitive processes that influence emergency decision-making. Method: Study 1 examined 2 years of emergency alerts distributed by a large southeastern university. In Study 2, participants listed emergencies in a thought-listing task. Study 3 measured participants’ time to decide if a situation was an emergency. Results: The university distributed the most alerts about an armed person, theft, and fire. In Study 2, participants most frequently listed fire, car accident, heart attack, and theft. In Study 3, participants quickly decided a bomb, murder, fire, tornado, and rape were emergencies. They most slowly decided that a suspicious package and identify theft were emergencies. Conclusion: Recent interaction with warnings was only somewhat related to participants’ mental models of emergencies. Risk identification precedes decision-making and applying protective actions. Examining these characteristics of people’s mental representations of emergencies is fundamental to further understand why some emergency warnings go ignored. Application: Someone must believe a situation is serious to categorize it as an emergency before taking the protective action recommendations in an emergency warning. Present-day research must continue to examine the problem of people ignoring warning communication, as there are important cognitive factors that have not yet been explored until the present research.

Toward a User-Centered Approach for Emergency Warning Distribution:

There are many known problems with inappropriate response to emergency warnings. Recommended actions are not always properly followed, and sometimes emergency warnings are not taken seriously. A variety of psychological individual differences can influence the perception of emergency warnings. At present, warning distributors do not consider how these factors affect emergency warning response. We recommend that emergency warning distribution systems be developed that account for these differences to improve response. To this end, we propose four guidelines supported by psychological research and inspired by currently available technologies. These guidelines frame a user-centered approach to more appropriately tailor warning messages for each recipient.

Individual Differences in Middle School and College Students’ Texting

The present study surveyed a sample of middle school students on their technology habits, with a primary focus on texting behaviors. A secondary sample of college students was surveyed as a comparison group to examine individual differences in texting behaviors. Results indicate that college students text more frequently than middle schoolers; however, college students’ texting behaviors decrease in frequency as they get older, whereas middle schoolers’ texting behaviors increase in frequency. Females also generally reported texting more frequently than males. Extraversion was found to be predictive of texting in the middle school sample, but both Extraversion and Neuroticism were found to be predictive of texting in the college sample. Results are discussed in the context of previous research and with respect to human factors and developmental psychology, such that the study of technology use could offer insight into the social development of adolescents and young adults.

Perceptions of Mobile Instant Messaging Apps Are Comparable to Texting for Young Adults in the United States

In recent years, text messaging (“texting”) has become the dominant method of communication for young adults. This prevalence of texting has led to research exploring the beneficial and detrimental behaviors associated with texting, indicating wide-ranging social and human factors implications. As texting continues to take precedence over other forms of communication and research begins to address texting behaviors, the question arises about whether people use other mobile instant messaging applications (“IM apps”) similarly. The current study expands on the research of texting behaviors by asking how similarly young adults view apps (e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.) to texting. Results indicated that young adults in the United States use texting more frequently than text-based apps, but that these apps are viewed similarly to texting. The implication is that research addressing texting behaviors may apply to other forms of text-based communication; however, texting remains the most prominent mode of communication, justifying its own continued examination.

Examination of the Use of Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics & Outlooks for the Future

Heuristics are commonly employed throughout various stages of the design process to evaluate the usability of interfaces. Heuristic Evaluation (HE) provides researchers with a cost effective and practical means to effectively assess designs. In this article, we aim to outline the development and application of one of the most frequently cited set of heuristic evaluation tools, Nielsen’s (1994) 10 usability heuristics. Nielsen’s heuristics have not only been applied to various modalities of interface design, but have also been compared to other usability evaluation methods. Moreover, in many cases they have been modified so that they can be applied in an ever-changing socio-technical environment. In reviewing these developments, we propose theoretical and practical implications of these heuristic methods and present an outlook for the future. We argue that with the rapid expansion and growth of technology in the last 20 years, Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics may need an update to remain consistent with modern usability problems.

Change in Memory of Emergency Warnings: The Case of An Averted Campus Shooting

The goal of this research was to examine individuals’ proximity, gender, and memories about a specific situation in which emergency alerts were distributed. Students, faculty, and alumni were surveyed online one week after an averted campus shooting and again nine months later. Overall, this research suggests that closer living proximity to campus positively influences subscription to the emergency alert system and that women are more interested in safety than men. Data suggest that participants’ memory of their emotional reaction to the event and their memory of perceiving the alerts as serious warnings stayed approximately the same. Responses immediately after the crisis indicated that people were significantly more confident in their memory and remember feeling more worry over not receiving a warning than did the responses nine months later. The uniqueness of the situation may have influenced the lack of memory inaccuracies, due to the reduced negativity and affect towards the situation.

Warnings for Hurricane Irma: Trust of Warning Type and Perceptions of Self-Efficacy and Susceptibility

The purpose of this study was to examine the types of risk communication received about Hurricane Irma by a university sample, along with their perceptions of self-efficacy and susceptibility to the storm. Three days after the storm, 176 individuals completed a survey that asked about how they received alerts, the frequency of the alerts received, and their trust in the different risk communication mediums. Additionally, respondents completed a susceptibility measure, a self-efficacy measure, and a storm fear questionnaire. Results showed that most people received alerts from their university alert system or social media. Participants trusted risk communication the most from text alerts and radio reports, but the least from social media. Additionally, results showed that those who received more alerts also had higher levels of perceived susceptibility to the hurricane, except for those who received 16 to 20 alerts. Perceived self-efficacy was not related to the number of alerts received. These data suggest that although many urge the use of social media for spreading emergency warnings, people distrust social media for risk communication, and that this mistrust may be due to recent cases of misinformation spreading on various platforms. In addition, these data suggest that there may be a “critical point” of alerting, such that receiving more than 5 hurricane alerts may lead to significant increase in perceptions of susceptibility to the storm. Future research should investigate the critical point of effective alerting and the effect that trust in the different mediums of alert technology has on motivation to comply with the warning’s protective action recommendations.

Understanding emergency response: lessons learned from the helping literature

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the need for collaboration between two areas of research: classical psychological helping behaviours and emergency warnings. A large-scale disaster (i.e., the Chicago Heat Wave) is used throughout the paper as an example in which knowledge of the helping behaviour literature could have assisted emergency responders. The emergency warning literature is reviewed within the context of people heeding the warnings and deciding to share the information with others. Developments in the helping literature are reviewed, along with a final summary of key lessons from this area of experimental research that can help answer questions for future emergency responders. With a better understanding of experimental findings in the area of prosocial behaviours, emergency managers may be better able to assist their communities. Likewise, a greater collaboration between these two fields may lead to more research with the intent of improving emergency response.

Reconsidering the “Conventional Wisdom” of the Relationship between False Alarms and Risk Beliefs

The purpose of this research was to examine how false alarm experience of weather-related emergencies affects the relationship between perceived danger and desire for warnings. Participants reported how dangerous they perceived each event to be, whether they believed warnings should be distributed, whether they had experienced the event, and whether they had experienced a false alarm of the event. Participants indicated strong agreement for the desire for weather warnings. Although the literature implies that people who have experienced many false alarms may perceive that danger as less severe in the future due to the “crywolf effect,” our data suggest that people have a heightened risk perception and desire for warnings of those events. Because memories inform mental representations that guide decision-making in uncertain situations, it is imperative that future research continue to examine what people have stored in memory of false alarm experiences to settle debates in the contentious literature of false alarms and risk perception.

Measurement of Technology Behaviors: A Look at Texting Scales

The measurement of technology behaviors occurs in everyday interactions with websites and smart devices, and can be applied to customize interfaces to improve users’ experiences as well as increasing revenues via targeted ads. This is possible because technology behaviors can reflect underlying personal and psychological characteristics about users that can be utilized to deliver custom-tailored content to each user. Texting is a one technology behavior that has been shown to be associated with a variety of psychological variables, including personality, depression, and anxiety, and has been shown to relate to socio-developmental differences among different age groups. Thus, the measurement of texting behaviors could have potential applications for researchers and practitioners. The present study examined a new scale to measure texting behavior: the Texting Behaviors Index (TBX; Schroeder & Sims, 2017), alongside two scales that measure problematic aspects of mobile phone use (Merlo, Stone, & Bibbey, 2013) and motivations for texting (Reid & Reid, 2007). Results indicate that measures from the TBX converge with the other texting scales, and support the TBX’s usefulness as a measure of texting behavior.