Experience, Behavior, and Action in Crisis Situations: A Literature Review

Janika Saretzki, Jürgen Pretsch, Ekaterina Pretsch and Gerhard Grossmann
Additional contact information
Janika Saretzki: ERC Experience Research - Consulting, Austria

European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research Articles, 2021, vol. 8

Abstract: This paper presents an initial literature review of human experience, behavior, and action in crises, disasters, and threat scenarios. Crisis scenarios under the sign of partly strategic terrorism represent a dominant trend in the observation of global transformations. In the context of a generally necessary understanding concerning both physical and psychological processes during the confrontation with specific threat scenarios, both previous and future psychological and social science studies are of great importance. Regarding the acute and chronic psychological, physical, and even social consequences of specific threat scenarios, the databases PSYNDEX, PsycARTICELS, and PTSDpubs (formerly PILOTS) were accessed. Numerous publications were extracted and summarized in the following. Despite the widespread and frequently used term terrorism, this designation definition has not been uniformly generalized to date. The psychological consequences of such stressful situations are often only addressed concerning the groups of people directly affected and limited to post-traumatic stress syndromes' development. However, theories and approaches must be emphasized, dedicated to the human reaction pattern in threat scenarios, to uncover specific behavioral patterns in the confrontation with one's vulnerability. Thus, the defense of one's values and norms in the sense of the Terror Management Theory (TMT) is one of the fundamental reactions of directly and indirectly affected groups of people, which is accompanied by corresponding physiological processes and also affective states. The consideration of individual reaction patterns due to increased sensitivity concerning diverse threat scenarios also represents a thoroughly critical approach since these patterns of experience, behavior, and action can lead to an impairment of the overall social coexistence. Previous theories and approaches in the context of psychological and social science disaster research make it clear that the experience, behavior, and action both before, during, and after various threat events require more specific consideration. The distinction between persons directly and indirectly affected by particular circumstances also appears necessary and should be considered in future research approaches, focusing on critical infrastructures.

Keywords: review paper; disaster research; terror management theory; terror salience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://brucol.be/index.php/ejser/article/view/6814 (text/html)
https://brucol.be/files/articles/ejser_v8_i3_21/Saretzki.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eur:ejserj:246

DOI: 10.26417/865zkc67y

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research Articles from Revistia Research and Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Revistia Research and Publishing ().