Training Opportunity: October 24, 2013. Hagerstown, Maryland. RAPID Psychological First Aid Training

RAPID~PSYCHOLOGICAL FIRST AID  The Johns Hopkins Preparedness and Emergency Response Learning Center and the DHMH Office of Preparedness and Response are pleased to offer the Johns Hopkins~RAPID Psychological First Aid Workshop. It is a 6-hour, interactive training that provides non-mental health professionals with the concepts and skills associated with Psychological First Aid. Utilizing the RAPID model (Reflective listening, Assessment of needs, Prioritization, Intervention, and Disposition), this specialized training provides perspectives on injuries and trauma that are beyond those physical in nature. Additionally, the RAPID model is readily applicable to public health settings, the workplace, the military, faith-based organizations, mass disaster venues, and even the demands of more commonplace critical events, e.g., dealing with the psychological aftermath of accidents, robberies, suicide, homicide, or community violence. DATE:  October 24, 2013 TIME:  9:00am - 4:00pm (registration begins at 8:00 am) LOCATION: Best Western Grand Venice Hotel, Hagerstown, MD 21740 ACCOMMODATIONS:  For those requiring overnight accommodations, a room rate of $65.90 is being offered. REGISTRATION:   https://trams.jhsph.edu/trams/index.cfm?event=training.catalogDisplay&trainingID=660 Additional Details Can Be Found Here:  http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-public-health-preparedness/training/calendar/index.html CONTACT INFORMATION:   Katurah Bland, 443-287-6735/kbland@jhsph.edu Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness 615 N. Wolfe Street, Room E7037 Baltimore, MD 21205 prepared@jhsph.edu -Or - Clifford Smith, 410-767-5266, clifford.smith@maryland.gov

Cultural Competencies\Cultural Differences. How Culture Molds Habit of Thought.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/science/how-culture-molds-habits-of-thought.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

How Culture Molds Habits Of Thought

By ERICA GOODE
Published: August 08, 2000

For more than a century, Western philosophers and psychologists have based their discussions of mental life on a cardinal assumption: that the same basic processes underlie all human thought, whether in the mountains of Tibet or the grasslands of the Serengeti.

Cultural differences might dictate what people thought about. Teenage boys in Botswana, for example, might discuss cows with the same passion that New York teenagers reserved for sports cars.

But the habits of thought -- the strategies people adopted in processing information and making sense of the world around them -- were, Western scholars assumed, the same for everyone, exemplified by, among other things, a devotion to logical reasoning, a penchant for categorization and an urge to understand situations and events in linear terms of cause and effect.

Recent work by a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, however, is turning this long-held view of mental functioning upside down..

In a series of studies comparing European Americans to East Asians, Dr. Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have found that people who grow up in different cultures do not just think about different things: they think differently.

''We used to think that everybody uses categories in the same way, that logic plays the same kind of role for everyone in the understanding of everyday life, that memory, perception, rule application and so on are the same,'' Dr. Nisbett said. ''But we're now arguing that cognitive processes themselves are just far more malleable than mainstream psychology assumed.''

A summary of the research will be published next winter in the journal Psychological Review, and Dr. Nisbett discussed the findings Sunday at the annual meetings of the American Psychological Association in Washington.

In many respects, the cultural disparities the researchers describe mirror those described by anthropologists, and may seem less than surprising to Americans who have lived in Asia. And Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues are not the first psychological researchers to propose that thought may be embedded in cultural assumptions: Soviet psychologists of the 1930's posed logic problems to Uzbek peasants, arguing that intellectual tools were influenced by pragmatic circumstances.

But the new work is stirring interest in academic circles because it tries to define and elaborate on cultural differences through a series of tightly controlled laboratory experiments. And the theory underlying the research challenges much of what has been considered gospel in cognitive psychology for the last 40 years.

''If it's true, it turns on its head a great deal of the science that many of us have been doing, and so it's sort of scary and thrilling at the same time,'' said Dr. Susan Andersen, a professor of psychology at New York University and an associate editor at Psychological Review.

In the broadest sense, the studies -- carried out in the United States, Japan, China and Korea -- document a familiar division. Easterners, the researchers find, appear to think more ''holistically,'' paying greater attention to context and relationship, relying more on experience-based knowledge than abstract logic and showing more tolerance for contradiction. Westerners are more ''analytic'' in their thinking, tending to detach objects from their context, to avoid contradictions and to rely more heavily on formal logic.

In one study, for example, by Dr. Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda, a graduate student at Michigan, students from Japan and the United States were shown an animated underwater scene, in which one larger ''focal'' fish swam among smaller fishes and other aquatic life.

Asked to describe what they saw, the Japanese subjects were much more likely to begin by setting the scene, saying for example, ''There was a lake or pond'' or ''The bottom was rocky,'' or ''The water was green.'' Americans, in contrast, tended to begin their descriptions with the largest fish, making statements like ''There was what looked like a trout swimming to the right.''

Over all, Japanese subjects in the study made 70 percent more statements about aspects of the background environment than Americans, and twice as many statements about the relationships between animate and inanimate objects. A Japanese subject might note, for example, that ''The big fish swam past the gray seaweed.''

''Americans were much more likely to zero in on the biggest fish, the brightest object, the fish moving the fastest,'' Dr. Nisbett said. ''That's where the money is as far as they're concerned.''

But the greater attention paid by East Asians to context and relationship was more than just superficial, the researchers found. Shown the same larger fish swimming against a different, novel background, Japanese participants had more difficulty recognizing it than Americans, indicating that their perception was intimately bound with their perception of the background scene.

When it came to interpreting events in the social world, the Asians seemed similarly sensitive to context, and quicker than the Americans to detect when people's behavior was determined by situational pressures.

Psychologists have long documented what they call the fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people to explain human behavior in terms of the traits of individual actors, even when powerful situational forces are at work. Told that a man has been instructed to give a speech endorsing a particular presidential candidate, for example, most people will still believe that the speaker believes what he is saying.

Yet Asians, according to Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues, may in some situations be less susceptible to such errors, indicating that they do not describe a universal way of thinking, but merely the way that Americans think.

In one study, by Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Incheol Choi, of Seoul National University in Korea, the Korean and American subjects were asked to read an essay either in favor of or opposed to the French conducting atomic tests in the Pacific. The subjects were told that the essay writer had been given ''no choice'' about what to write. But subjects from both cultures still showed a tendency to ''err,'' judging that the essay writers believed in the position endorsed in the essays.

When the Korean subjects were first required to undergo a similar experience themselves, writing an essay according to instructions, they quickly adjusted their estimates of how strongly the original essay writers believed what they wrote. But Americans clung to the notion that the essay writers were expressing sincere beliefs.

One of the most striking dissimilarities found by the researchers emerged in the way East Asians and Americans in the studies responded to contradiction. Presented with weaker arguments running contrary to their own, Americans were likely to solidify their opinions, Dr. Nisbett said, ''clobbering the weaker arguments,'' and resolving the threatened contradiction in their own minds. Asians, however, were more likely to modify their own position, acknowledging that even the weaker arguments had some merit.

In one study, for example, Asian and American subjects were presented with strong arguments in favor of financing a research project on adoption. A second group was presented both with strong arguments in support of the project and weaker arguments opposing it.

Both Asian and American subjects in the first group expressed strong support for the research. But while Asian subjects in the second group responded to the weaker opposing arguments by decreasing their support, American subjects increased their endorsement of the project in response to the opposing arguments.

In a series of studies, Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Kaiping Peng of the University of California at Berkeley found that Chinese subjects were less eager to resolve contradictions in a variety of situations than American subjects. Asked to analyze a conflict between mothers and daughters, American subjects quickly came down in favor of one side or the other. Chinese subjects were more likely to see merit on both sides, commenting, for example, that, ''Both the mothers and the daughters have failed to understand each other.''

Given a choice between two different types of philosophical argument, one based on analytical logic, devoted to resolving contradiction, the other on a dialectical approach, accepting of contradiction, Chinese subjects preferred the dialectical approach, while Americans favored the logical arguments. And Chinese subjects expressed more liking than Americans for proverbs containing a contradiction, like the Chinese saying ''Too modest is half boastful.'' American subjects, Dr. Nisbett said, found such contradictions ''rather irritating.''

Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Ara Norenzayan of the University of Illinois have also found indications that when logic and experiential knowledge are in conflict, Americans are more likely than Asians to adhere to the rules of formal logic, in keeping with a tradition that in Western societies began with the Ancient Greeks.

For example, presented with a logical sequence like, ''All animals with fur hibernate. Rabbits have fur. Therefore rabbits hibernate,'' the Americans, the researchers found, were more likely to accept the validity of the argument, separating its formal structure, that of a syllogism, from its content, which might or might not be plausible. Asians, in contrast, more frequently judged such syllogisms as invalid based on their implausibility -- not all animals with fur do in fact hibernate.

While the cultural disparities traced in the researchers' work are substantial, their origins are much less clear. Historical evidence suggests that a divide between Eastern and Occidental thinking has existed at least since ancient times, a tradition of adversarial debate, formal logical argument and analytic deduction flowering in Greece, while in China an appreciation for context and complexity, dialectical argument and a tolerance for the ''yin and yang'' of life flourished.

How much of this East-West difference is a result of differing social and religious practices, different languages or even different geography is anyone's guess. But both styles, Dr. Nisbett said, have advantages, and both have limitations. And neither approach is written into the genes: many Asian-Americans, born in the United States, are indistinguishable in their modes of thought from European-Americans.

Dr. Alan Fiske, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said that experimental research like Dr. Nisbett's ''complements a lot of ethnographic work that has been done.''

''Anthropologists have been describing these cultures and this can tell you a lot about everyday life and the ways people talk and interact,'' Dr. Fiske said. ''But it's always difficult to know how to make sense of these qualitative judgments, and they aren't controlled in the same way that an experiment is controlled.''

Yet not everyone agrees that all the dissimilarities described by Dr. Nesbitt and his colleagues reflect fundamental differences in psychological process.

Dr. Patricia Cheng, for example, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said that many of the researchers' findings meshed with her own experience. ''Having grown up in a traditional Chinese family and also being in Western culture myself,'' she said, ''I do see some entrenched habits of interpretation of the world that are different across the cultures, and they do lead to pervasive differences.''

But Dr. Cheng says she thinks that some differences -- the Asian tolerance for contradiction, for example -- are purely social. ''There is not a difference in logical tolerance,'' she said.

Still, to the extent that the studies reflect real differences in thinking and perception, psychologists may have to radically revise their ideas about what is universal and what is not, and to develop new models of mental process that take cultural influences into account.

American Promise is Coming...

American Promise is Coming... Winner at the   More than 100 documentary films were screened at this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, including 37 feature films and 15 shorts in competition, that were selected from more than 1,200 total submissions. Films from 16 different countries were exhibited, underlining the international profile of the Triangle's signature film event. The festival's top prize - the Reva and David Logan Grand Jury Award for feature-length documentary - went to the film "American Promise," which follows two African-American boys from kindergarten through high school at New York's prestigious Dalton School. Co-directors Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster, parents of one of the two boys featured in the film, shot footage during the course of 13 years to complete the project. "The one thing we want to promote is family," Brewster said. "And what we felt when we came here [to the festival] is that this is a family." Click Here to see trailer of American Promise. Click Here for More Information on American Promise.

Food Security. US; FDA Recall: Big Blue Fisheries is recalling ALL smoked products

Recalls, Market Withdrawals and Safety Alerts for U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA).
This information has recently been updated and is now available.

Big Blue Fisheries, Llc Recalls All Smoked Products From All Lots, Various Sizes, in Vacuum Packaging Because of Possible Health Risk

09/30/2013 09:33 PM EDT

Big Blue Fisheries is recalling ALL smoked products from all lots and codes, various sizes, in vacuum packages because the products may not have been properly cooked and have the potential to be contaminated with Clostridium botulinum, a bacterium which can cause life-threatening illness or death. 

Consumers are warned not to use the product even if it does not look or smell spoiled.

For detailed information pertaining to this Recalls, Market Withdrawals and Safety Alerts message, please click the link at the beginning of this bulletin.

International: UNISDR. Finland set to launch HFA Peer Review

http://www.unisdr.org/archive/34883

Finland set to launch HFA peer review

Looking up: The EFDRR is determined to share Europe’s experience in the lead-up to a new international framework for DRR. Photo: Hanne Negaard

 

By Andy McElroy

GENEVA, 1 October 2013 – Finland is set to follow in the footsteps of the UK this week and launch a peer review of its national implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), the global agreement on disaster risk reduction. 

The 4th European Forum for Disaster Risk Reduction (EFDRR) heard that Finland is aiming for the same impact as the UK’s peer review – the world’s first – which served as a catalyst for high-level engagement and reflection. 

As Finland prepared for its review, which gets underway on 5 October, EFDRR members called for a better understanding of advances in governance and accountability of disaster management. They agreed to consolidate Europe’s learning in this regard. 

Similarly, as part of consultations ahead of the post-2015 international framework for disaster risk reduction, EFDRR members reiterated support of work towards reducing disaster risks at the local level. Germany, Norway, Poland, France and the European Commission/DG Climate Action and the Council of Europe have been in the lead on this process thus far. 

The Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) Regional Office for Europe, Paola Albrito, said: “The EFDRR confirmed the firm commitment of our European actors and regional partners for a sound joint collaboration towards building resilience to disasters in the region.” 

European countries have achieved significant progress in implementing the HFA. The recent establishment of national platforms for disaster risk reduction in Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Greece has brought the total number on the continent to 25. 

There has also been movement in the establishment of legal and regulatory frameworks for DRR. More countries are moving from a culture of reactive disaster response and recovery to proactive risk reduction and safety. However, significant challenges remain in implementing the HFA, particularly in terms of the lack of adequate resources to support DRR measures. 

The Forum agreed it needed to strengthen its influence on policymaking and practice as part of the global consultations to forge a post-2015 international framework at the World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction in Japan, in 2015. 

Mr Dag Olav Hogvold, of the Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection and Emergency Planning, highlighted two important principles for the Forum to continue to prosper. 

“First, international cooperation benefits all of us; we don’t do it just for the sake of it. Second, we need to keep trying to work with nature rather than trying to beat it,” he said. 

The European Forum was hosted by the Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection and Emergency Planning and organised in collaboration with UNISDR and the Council of Europe. 

The platform advocates for strong implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action and acts as a knowledge sharing platform for various European partners. 

The 5th European Forum is due to be in Madrid, in September 2014 hosted by Spain’s National Office for Civil Protection.

Date:

1 Oct 2013

Sources:

• United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction - Regional Office for Europe (UNISDR EUR)