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CHRONIC NOISE EXPOSURE AND CHILDREN: CARDIOVASCULAR AND NEUROENDOCRINE PROCESSES.
EVANS, Gary W.; BULLINGER, Monika; HYGGE, Staffan; GUTMAN, George and AZIZ; Naeema.
Cross-sectional and longitudinal data on blood pressure and urinary catecholamines and cortisol are presented fron nearly 400 children, aged 9-11 years. Data were collected before and after the shutdown of the old Munich International Airport and before and after the inauguration of the new Munich airport. At both sites comparison groups of children with similar socioeconomic background were also monitored. Significant relationships between noise levels and cardiovascular and neuroendocrine processes are revealed. Involvement of perceived annoyance in the process is also indicated, especially for cortisol.
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ATTITUDES OF AMERICAN AND JAPANESE STUDENTS TOWARD INTERPERSONAL AGGRESSION.
FUJIHARA, Takehiro and KOHYAMA, Takaya; Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan.
BLECKMAN, Sandra and WAPNER, Seymour; Clark University.
Two hundred students from a university in the northcast region of the United States (100 males, 100 females) and 242 students from a University in Japan (137 males, 105 females) completed a questionnaire that examined their attitudes of being aggressive in varying degrees toward other people in situations ranging from the extremes of "As a way of overcoming communication" to "In self-defense". Factor analyses of aggressive action scores revealed three factors, that is, physical aggression, direct verbal aggression, and indirect verbal aggression. Independent of cultures, all three factors of aggressive behavior were evident in the defensive situations; moreover, relative to women, men showed greater physical aggression, and greater indirect verbal aggression in the non-defensive situations. Cultural differences were found with respect to indirect verbal aggression and direct verbal one. Overall, relative to the Japanese, the Americans showed greater indirect verbal behavior, and less direct verbal behavior. But, there was a cultural difference depending on the situation. Relative to Japanese, the Americans were more physically aggressive in defensive situations.
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RELATIONSHIPS OF PROENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDES WITH MATERIALISM AND ITS ASSOCIATED ATTITUDES TOWARD MONEY.
IWATA, Osamu; University of Tokushima, Japan.
Hypothesis: Proenvironmental attitudes have negative relationships with materialism and its associated attitudes toward money. Questionnaires were administered to 46 male and 71 female undergraduates of the University of Tokushima Each questionnaire contained a27-item proenvironmental attitude scale, a 6-item materialism scale and a 15-item scale of attitudes toward money.
Proenvironmental attitudes consisted of five factors (Iwata, 1990): approach to information on environmental problems, rejection of driving one's own car, awareness of the possibility of human survival in environmental pollution, anti-pollution purchasing behavior and support for population control. The total score of these factors was designated as proenvironmentalism. The six-item materialism scale yielded one factor, "materialism". Materialism associated attitudes toward money had two factors (Haraoka, 1990): "Money as a base for the mechanism of modern society and our life" and "Money as affecting purposes and values of human life". The sum of item scores for each factor was ccmputed and product-moment correlation coefficients were calculated from the measures mentioned above. Higher scores represented stronger proenvironmental attitudes, materialism, and materialism- associated attitudes toward money. Low but significant correlation coefficients between proenvironmental attitudes and materialism-associated measures supported the hypothesis.
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CLASSROOM EXPERIMENTS ON THE EFFECTS OF DIFFERENT NOISE SOURCES AND NOISE LEVELS ON LONG-TERM LEARNING IN CHILDREN.
HYGGE, Staffan; Royal Institute of Technology, Gavle, Sweden.
More than 800 students aged 12-14 years participated in two noise experiments in their regular classrooms. Three morning learning sessions on three different texts were conducted. The first session was a pre-test for learning ability. Sessions two and three were counterbalanced as the noisy and silent (ambient noise) conditions. Recognition and recall tests were given one week later. The first experiment was run with four noise sources, aircraft, road traffic, train and verbal noise (foreign languages) presented at 66 dBA Leq. The silent condition was %42-44 dBA Leq. The second experiment was run with the same aircraft and road traffic noises, but played back at 55 dBA Leq. At the higher noise level there was no effect on recognition. On recall items at 66 dBA Leq, aircraft and road traffic noise impaired learning, but train and verbal noise did not. The average recall impairments from aircraft and road traffic noise were %20 and %30 % respectively. At the 55 dBA Leq -level, aircraft noise again impaired recall (%24 %), but road traffic noise did not. Also, for aircraft noise there was an effect on recognition. Thus, the dose-response relationships for both aircraft and road traffic noise are not linear. At both noise levels, the noise effects did not interact with learning ability as measured by the pre-test. Questionnaire data seem to rule out distraction, perceived effort and difficulty as explanations of the results. Differences in noise levels exceeded for a certain fraction of the time-period, predictability and degree of fluctuations for the aircraft, road traffic and train noise are discussed as causes for the learning effects. For the verbal noise, it is speculated that there is a difference between natural and machine-made noise in attracting attention and impairing short- or long-term leaming.PO ENV 6
THE MUNICH AIRPORT NOISE STUDY: COGNITIVE EFFECTS ON CHILDREN FROM BEFORE TO AFTER THE CHANGE OVER OF AIRPORTS.
HYGGE, Staffan; Royal Institute of Technology, Gävle, Sweden.
BULLINGER, Monika; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany.
EVANS, Gary W.; Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y., USA.
Before the shutdown of the former Munich International Airport and the inauguration of the current one, children were recruited into experimental and control groups at both airports. The two experimental groups are comprised of the children at the old airport that were exposed to high levels of aircraft noise, and the children who are exposed at the new airport. The two control groups were matched to their respective experimental groups on the basis of sociodemographic characteristics. On two consecutive days before the change over of airports, 396 children, aged 9-11, were tested individually in an air-conditioned and sound attenuated trailer. Measures included overnight urinary catecholarnines and cortisol, resting and reactivity measures of cardiovascular functioning, calibrated indices of annoyance to different noise sources, speech discrimination against different noise backgrounds, reaction time under noise and quiet conditions, visual search, running-memory span, long-term memory, performance on a standardized reading and word-list test, a Glass and Singer noise aftereffect trace test, perceived noise and six months environmental quality in the residential setting, and standardized quality of life indices. After the change over of airports, approximately 375 children from the original sample were retested with the same or parallel tests. Results from cognitive measures before and after the change over of airports will be presented. Preliminary analyses indicate adaptation in perceptual phenomena (e.g. signal-to-noise discrimination), deficits in memory, and poorer reading skills in the noisy communities.
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CROSS-SECTIONA STUDY OF SOCIAL DOMINANCE AMONG PRESCHOOL CHILDREN: AN ETHOLOGICAL APPROACH.
CIRADE, C.; TRUDEL, M. and DUFRESNE, M.; Université du Québec, Montréal, Canada.
Ethological studies have described the contribution of social dominance to regularization of agonistic activities among preschhool childres (Strayer, 1986; Trudel, 1985). The combination of all the asymmetrical exchanges between every dyad leads to the establishment of the power structure in the group. These observations identified an age effect showing that hourly rate of conflicts declines toward the end of preschool years. Controverial resuls were also reported relating differential frequency of agonistic activities for boys and girls (Maccoby, 1987; Strayer, 1984). These works have been already applied to large groups, but comparively few studies have been carried out with children in small group. Our objective is to study the modalities of regulations in small groups so that a better understanding of the way social dominance is established. This research has been carried out in 4 nurseries in Montreal with 18 groups of six children (3 girls and 3 boys) al three age levels (2, 3 and 4). For each observed exchange, the initiator, the action, the social target and the response were coded according to Strayer's agonistic taxonomy (1979). The behavior categories retained were "threat", "attack" and "competition", followed by a submissive behavior. Preliminary descriptive analyses have put into light differences depending on age and sex. The proportion of conflicts was higher with boys than with girls and was proportionally reduce as the group grows older. These resuls go in the same direction as Strayer's studies on large groups, but in seems that to put the group's specificities into evidence, analyses must be undertaken on factoslikely to interfere, such as space and available objects.
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EFFECTS TO MEDIATE CROWDING ON TRAIN'S PHYSICAL STRUCTURE.
HOMMA, Michiko; Japan Women's University, Tokyo, Japan.
One of the urban environmental problem is various phenomena occured (or caused) by crowded congestion. In Tokyo, the problem is particularly serious in many aspects. Crowds on commuting trains in the morning and evening rush hours shows this phenomenon.
Recently, the new model train for commuters have been developed seats were fold up in the carriages to provide more room for the commuters during the rush hours to relieve the congestion and to carry as many passengers as possible. However, we suspected whether such a train is effective or not. Because some researchers indicated that the social structure in order mediate feel crowding. Then,it's physical structure is hinder to construct the ordering arrangement of person.
Therefore,on a hypothesis that this new system doesn't seem to help to increase physical density and rather increase the passengers stress and crowding, we conducted quasi-experiment on manipulating 2 independent variables on differences of density and the differences of type the train. Subjects for this study were commuting trains running Yamanote-Line and their perceived density,perceived crowding and heart rate were measured.
As the result, the hypothesis was substantiated. This experiment has proved that this new model carriages for passengers could be obstacle to its proceedings of social structure.
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AN ACTOR-PHASE MODEL FOR BEHAVIOR CHANGE TO PROMOTE ENERGY SAVINGS (APBC-MODEL).
JAGER, W.; BIESIOT, W.; HENDRICKX, L.; KOK, R.; SIERO, F.; VLEK, Ch. and WILTING, H.; University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
A prescriptive model, called the Actor-Phase model for Behavior Change (APBC-model) has been developed to guide multidisciplinary research on the planning of energy savings in industry, commerce and households. The APBC-model rests upon a life-cycle analysis of relevant activities, products or processes with respect to energy use. ln each phase of the life-cycle significant energyinvolved actors are identified. This yields an actor-by-phase matrix of energy using behaviors. These are then characterized by their behavior type or mechanism (e.g. as guided by decisions, personal attitudes, social norms, habits, needs). After the main behavioral determinants for each actor-phase combination have been diagnosed, appropriate intervention strategies and measures to achieve energy savings are determined. Six basic strategies for behavior change are involved, ranging from technical modifications to social-organizational changes. The APBC-model comprises three basic activities: (1) a technical-behavioral diagnosis of the process of energy use, (2) design and planning of well-tuned intervention strategies andmeasures, and (3) prediction of energy savings effects obtained via technical as well as behavioral changes and adaptations. Some empirical illustrations of the APBC-model approach will be presented.
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DISASTER THREAT PERCEPTION IN DIFFERENT REGIONS OF SLOVENIA.
KLINE, M.; POLIC, M.; TUSAK, M. and ZABUKOVEC, V.; University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Plans of disaster mitigations, interventions, and warning of threatened populations are frequently inefficient just because of the false conceptions people hold about hazards in their environment. Therefore, a research was accomplished, concerning perception of different hazards in different regions of Slovenia. There are differences in major threats, these regions are exposed to (e.g. prevalence of earthquake, flood, avalanche, hail, drought, nuclear power plant accident etc.). Representative samples of inhabitants were questioned about these hazards, their probabilities of occurrence and other relevant characteristics, about their plans and behaviours concerning eventual occurrence of certain hazard, about the role of different agencies etc. Influences of demographic characteristics (sex, education, age) were also analysed. Findings are explained in the frame of Simon's bounded rationality model, and Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour. Recommendations for future preventive activities are suggested.
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VALUE PERSPECTIVES ON THE OCEAN: PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSES.
SIMMONS, D.; Oregon State University, Oregon, United Stated.
Human environment includes the ocean, the well; being of which has become a concern to many. If, as Hartman proposed, "A thing is good when it fulfills the definition of its concept", then any evaluation of the state of the ocean would depend upon the definition(s) used. Thirty-seven definitions of the ocean were presented to 213 university students who
indicated the "personal meaningfulness" of each; definition on a 6-point scale, from dislike (-1); through neutral to "of supreme importance" (+4). Two SYSTAT principal component analyses were conducted: the first, using correlations among eleven proposed value perspective scales (each consisting of three definitions), produced a two; factor solution; the second, using correlations; among the 33 individual definitions used in the eleven scales (plus four "filler" definitions), identified four factors (validated by scree test). The latter four factors were labeled Recreation ("a place where people can get together for visits"), Commerce ("a place where people can find work"), Ecology ("a representation of the interrelatedness, of all life"), and Technology ("a major resource for future farming of plants and sealife"). The means for the items loading on the factors were: Recreation 1.55, Commerce 1.34, Ecology 1.36, Technology .81. Criticism of study includes range of definition content and respondent diversity.
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EFFECTS OF SOCIAL NETWORKS ON CROSS-CULTURAL ADJUSTMENT.
TANAKA, Tomoko; KOHYAMA, Takaya and FUJIHARA, Takehiro; MINAMI,Hirofumi; Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan.
TAKAI, Jiro; Nagoya City University, Nagoya, Japan.
A questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate the effects of social network formations on the adjustment of international students in Japan. A total of 235 valid responses were obtained. Four types of adjustment were identified: 1) general maladjustment type; 2) self-control adjustment type; 3) affiliative adjustment type; 4 dependent adjustment type. Regression analyses were conducted implementing network size, demographic variables and relationship traits, such as expected amount of support. For each adjustment type, variables were identified which showed to have high causal relationship. Some of the conditions which seemed to show network effects on adjustment were lack of language ability and race (Westerner vs. Asian), but length of stay failed to show indication of difference.
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EVALUATION OF LARGE-SCALE CHANGES IN LANDSCAPES.
VAN DEN BERG, A. E. and VLEK, C.A.J.; University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
COETERIER, J. F.; Staring Centre Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Existing research on landscape evaluation has focused nearly exclusively on explaining and predicting the aesthetic value of landscapes. Several models for landscape evaluation have been developed on the basis of this research (e.g. Kaplan, 1987; Purcell, 1986). However, the applicability of these models for predicting the evaluation of changes in landscapes seems to be limited. The presented poster will depict a model, which describes landscape evaluation as the result of two cognitive processes: (1) comparison of the landscape with a mental representation of a prototypical landscape, and (2) comparison of the landscape with a mental representation of an ideal landscape. It is supposed that comparison with a prototype reflects the process of aesthetic judgment, while comparison with the ideal landscape reflects a more "functional" judgmental process. The relative importance of the two processes depends on both motivational factors (involvement) and cognitive factors (availability and accessibility of mental representations). Especially when involvement is high, as in most situations where changes in landscapes are to be judged, the ideal landscape seems to be a better predictor of preference than the prototypical landscape.
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PERSON-ENVIRONMENT FIT AND PERCEIVED LIFE SATISFACTION.
WALLENIUS, Marjut; University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland.
This study examined relations between person-environment fit and perceived life satisfaction. With person-environment fit we refer to a person's possibilities to get environmental support to his or her goals. Both models of person-environment fit and models of goal systems emphasize the importance of the possibilities to attain central goals to psychological well-being. The data contains 167 structured interviews with some 30 year old persons. Little's (1983) Personal Project Matrix Method was used together with questions concerning everyday environment. Life satisfaction was rated using 11-point scale. According to the results the factor structure of personal project system follows that found in earlier studies. High life satisfaction was found to be significantlyassociated both with some dimensions of personal project system (especially with social support) and with measures on environmental support.
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URBAN RENEWAL: STUDENT PROJECTS IN COMMUNITY PLANNING AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN.
WICHMAN, Ann; University of La Verne, La Verne, California, USA.
This poster presents a method for teaching principles of community planning and environmental design including a community project that teaches students how to apply these principles while they are in the process of learning the subject. Even if the outside project is not actually conducted the students gain a sense of efficacy by presenting their designs to authorities to educate them about what can be done. The model was tested in a psychology class at a liberal arts college and in a sociology class at a university using the same project site. The authors selected a 10-acre site with no buildings in a depressed area of a moderate sized city. Groups in each class were challenged to: design an environment for the site that would improve the quality of life for those living in the surrounding area. The demands of the project served as powerful motivators for learning the details of the subject needed to complete the task. Students quickly learn that environmental designers must balance powerful competing forces among the needs and desires of those who will use an environment, their own creative ideas, and the political, regulatory, and financial circumstances that exist.