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Natural disasters and human induced disasters are common phenomena in Southeast Asia. As such, there is a need to understand people's vulnerability to disasters and their resilience, as well as their risk behavior and attitudes. Attitude is largely influenced by cultural and demographic factors; this research examined the effects in the context of psycho-cultural situation awareness. Attitude is defined as a summative of five components: risk identification, cognition, affect, trust and behavior; which were explored at three levels of situation awareness: perception, comprehension and projection. Therefore, the objectives of the study were: (1) to identify psycho-cultural similarities and/or differences in risk attitudes of communities for the purpose of disaster management; and (2) to identify group trust and information dissemination network in the face of disasters for the purpose of disaster aid planning., Prepared in collaboration with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

The researchers modeled disaster risk attitudes using top down and bottom up approaches. Top down, they constructed an attitudinal model to comprise of affect, behavior and cognition (ABC). Bottom-up, they mined ABC semantics from narratives of disaster experiences and gathered ABC data in online and field surveys. This report presents the findings of a pilot study that was conducted online to determine the suitability of the disaster attitudinal dashboard in measuring ABC, as well as to validate the ABC model.

This document presents an investigation into the attitudes of disaster experience from text corpora of narratives and reports. Attitude is made up of three components: Affect, Behavior, and Cognition (ABC). The narratives comprised personal stories obtained from Internet blogs, and the reports were research and media articles about people's experiences derived from digital libraries. This study identifies the semantics of disaster experience for development of hybrid ontologies that may be used to model attitudes in the face of disasters. Different disaster scenarios revealed different mapping relationships of ABC.

The Rosetta-II Project: Measuring National Differences was a multinational cultural cognition research project involving teams from Japan, Korea, Malaysia, India, China , and USA. The objective of the study was to expand upon measures made in Rosetta I. Investigators at each site focused on 1) developing a set of perceptual and simple cognitive measures that can validly predict complex cognition conceptually related to sensemaking in natural contexts; 2) delineating the relationships between these simple measure and complex cognitive functions; and 3) determining national differences in cognitive measures. In addition to the common measurement tools to be used for the research, the Korean and Japanese teams explored developing measures for Holism and Decision making Behavior respectively. A separate report combining data from all Rosetta II investigators, is being prepared by Dr. Helen Klein, under a separate contract with Ball Aerospace Corporation, Dayton, Ohio., Alternative title: The Rosetta-II Project: Measuring National Differences. Prepared in cooperation with International Islamic University and Damai-Sciences, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, Beijing University, Beijing, China, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India, Hokkaido University, Hokkaido, Japan, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, and Singapore Management University, Singapore. Sponsored by additional contract numbers: FA4869-07-1-4019, FA4869-07-1-4033, FA4869-07-1-4031 and FA4869-07-1-4026. Additional monitor numbers: AOARD-074033, AOARD-074031, AOARD-074026. The original document contains color images.