Leilani Greening

Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in Parentally Bereaved Children and Adolescents

OBJECTIVE To compare parentally bereaved children with a disaster comparison group and a nontrauma control group on measures of emotional adjustment. METHOD Children and adolescents who had lost a parent (n = 39), had experienced a tornado disaster (n = 69), or were coping with an ongoing social or academic stressor (n = 118) completed measures of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, anxiety, and depression. Risk factors for symptoms among the bereaved children also were evaluated. RESULTS Parentally bereaved children reported significantly more PTSD symptoms than the disaster and nontrauma control groups. Among the bereaved children, girls, younger children, and children living with a surviving parent who scored high on a measure of posttraumatic stress reported more symptoms. CONCLUSION Children and adolescents who have lost a parent could be vulnerable to PTSD symptoms.

Adolescents' perceived risk and personal experience with natural disasters: an evaluation of cognitive heuristics.

Elevated risk judgments for negative life events have been linked to personal experience with events. We tested the hypothesis that cognitive heuristics are the underlying cognitive mechanism for this relation. The availability (i.e., memory for incidents) and simulation (i.e., imagery) heuristics were evaluated as possible mediators for the relation between personal experience and risk estimates for fatal weather events. Adolescents who had experienced weather disasters estimated their personal risk for weather events. Support was obtained for the simulation heuristic (imagery) as a mediator for the relation. Availability for lightning disaster experience was also found to be a mediator for the relation between personal lightning disaster experience and risk estimate for future events. The implications for risk perception research are discussed.

The mediating effects of attributional style and event-specific attributions on postdisaster adjustment

Attributional style and event-specific internal attributions were examined as cognitive mediators for the negative effect of disaster exposure on emotional adjustment following the Northridge earthquake. The positive relation between disaster exposure and emotional sequelae was found to be mediated by ascribing to a depressogenic attributional style in which negative outcomes were attributed to internal, stable, and global causes. Ascribing to a depressogenic attributional style did not mediate the relation between PTSD symptoms and disaster exposure, thus providing some support for an attributional-style-symptom-specific relation in the context of postdisaster adjustment.

Risk perception following exposure to a job-related electrocution accident: the mediating role of perceived control

Perceived control was proposed to be a significant mediator for the relation often observed between mental simulation (simulation heuristic) and perceived personal risk for future lethal events. Baron and Kennys (1986) procedure for testing a mediational hypothesis was used to evaluate this hypothesis. Employees of a recreational facility where a lifeguard was accidently electrocuted and a matched control group (N = 32) estimated their perceived risk for future electrocution events, how much personal control they believed they had over preventing future events, and the degree of clarity for mentally simulating future events. Although perceived control was not found to be a significant mediator for the relation between mental simulation and perceived risk as hypothesized, both mental simulation and perceived control accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in perceived risk for future electrocution events. The trauma group reported significantly higher ratings for perceived risk and mental simulation of future events. However, the trauma group did not differ from the non-trauma group on perceived control over future events. Possible explanations for the relatively high degree of perceived control over future electrocution events within the trauma group, in spite of their experience with a near-fatal electrocution event, are discussed.

Reading too much between the lines : illusory correlation and the word association implications test

Abstract We examined the illusory correlation phenomenon with the Word Association Implications Test (WAIT), a task where diagnoses and signs are causally connected due to priming effects. The WAIT is an analogue to clinical assessments in which subjects “read between the lines” of target persons’ word associations which have been primed by fantasized scripts. 164 undergraduates were randomly assigned to study WAIT protocols with either 0, 30, 70, or 100% of the targets veridically identified. Following subjects’ examination of WAIT protocols, we assessed their incidental learning of valid diagnostic clues (i.e., their clue schemata). Subjects given no veridical diagnoses showed minimal incidental learning. However, those given 30, 70, and 100% veridical diagnoses showed equivalent incidental learning of diagnostic clues and all exceeded an intuition (no experience) comparison group. The results suggested that an illusory correlation operated even when clues and diagnoses have causal, not just contingent, connection. Successful judges must contend not only with others’ tools for avoiding prediction but with their own tendencies to read too much between the lines.