Threat Perception Research Articles

Gendered Perceptions of Threat and Challenge during Regional Conflict: A Multi-generational Study of Holocaust Survivors and Descendants

Gendered Perceptions of Threat and Challenge during Regional Conflict: A Multi-generational Study of Holocaust Survivors and Descendants

Innovative Game-Based Teaching Methods for Promoting Nursing Students' Cultural Competence and Attitudes Toward Refugees: An Explanatory Sequential Mixed Study.

Nursing cultural competence is crucial for enhancing the quality of care for refugees. While innovative game-based teaching methods have been used to foster in a wide range of clinical competences, little is known about its use on refugees' care. This study aims to evaluate the effect of these methods on nursing students' cultural competence and attitudes toward refugees. An explanatory sequential mixed design was conducted from March to May 2023. One-hundred forty-one nursing students participated. There were no statistically significant differences in total Outgroup Threat Perception Scale and Cultural Competence Assessment Scale scores between the experimental and control groups, pre- or post-intervention. However, students reported increased awareness and empathy for refugee issues. The study showed that innovative game-based teaching methods effectively increased nursing students' awareness of health-related issues faced by refugees. It recommends incorporating transcultural nursing courses into curricula and professional training, with updated content on migration and refugee issues.

Local residents’ attitudes toward and contact with international students: a perspective from Montreal, Quebec

As migrants holding temporary, foreign-resident status in their host communities, international students often experience prejudice and have little meaningful contact with locals. To date, a comprehensive account of international students’ experience is lacking, and existing conceptualizations exclude linguistic threat as a potential source of increased prejudice and diminished contact. Therefore, our goal in this study (set in Quebec, Canada) was to explore local residents’ attitudes toward and contact with international students in relation to five potential threats experienced by local residents, including cultural differences, competition over resources, intergroup anxiety, stereotypes, with linguistic threat added as a new, previously unexplored variable. We recruited 59 student and non-student local francophone residents as participants and examined their attitudes toward, perceptions of threat from, and the quality and quantity of contact with international students attending English-medium universities. Both student and non-student participants demonstrated positive attitudes toward and low levels of perceived threat from international students, except for linguistic threat. Compared to student participants, non-student participants reported significantly greater linguistic threat from international students and described contact with them that was both less frequent and lower in quality. Regression models accounted for 50–67% of variance in participants’ attitudes, with symbolic threat to social values and belief systems emerging as the common significant predictor of attitudes for both groups. Adding linguistic threat did not improve regression models. Finally, only contact quality showed significant relationships with attitudes and perceived threat, where greater contact quality was associated with more favorable attitudes and reduced threat. We discuss implications of intergroup attitudes and contact for language planning and use in multilingual contexts.

Young Bedouin-Arab Men’s Ego and Pride: Do Traditional Masculinity and Positive Attitudes Toward Polygyny Shape Responses to a Wife’s Refusal?

Cultural traditions in Israel’s Bedouin-Arab community encourage and permit men to take up to four wives, a practice supported by Islamic teachings. Despite legal prohibitions against polygyny in Israel, such marriages remain common and have profound effects on women, children, and broader society. This study explores how traditional notions of masculinity and positive attitudes toward polygyny influence young Bedouin men’s reactions to a hypothetical scenario in which their wife refuses to accept a polygynous marriage as a threat to men’s ego and pride. The sample consisted of 459 young, unmarried Israeli Bedouin-Arab men, aged 16 to 25, a demographic frequently under family pressure to marry, making the issue of marriage highly relevant. We hypothesized that traditional masculinity and favorable attitudes toward polygyny would be positively associated with heightened perceptions of ego and pride threats in response to a wife’s refusal. Participants were randomly assigned to imagine either their wife refusing a polygynous arrangement (n = 228) or accepting a polygynous arrangement (n = 231) and then reporting their anticipated emotional responses. The results showed that traditional masculinity was linked to positive attitudes toward polygyny, and both were significantly associated with increased perceptions of ego and pride threats in the refusal scenario but not in the acceptance scenario. The findings suggest that men with strong masculine identities and favorable views of polygyny are especially vulnerable to feeling threatened by a wife’s refusal. This supports social construction theory and underscores the role of cultural norms in shaping emotional responses. The discussion highlights the psychological impacts of polygyny in patriarchal societies and calls for culturally sensitive interventions that challenge traditional norms while fostering psychological resilience and gender equality.

The core of division: Examining how essentialist views of the U.S. underlie right‐wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and nationalism

AbstractWe propose that political polarization stems in part from differing conceptions of one's nation. Four studies tested the hypothesis that national essentialism – conceiving one's nation as possessing an inherent, unchanging essence – underlies three political ideologies: right‐wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and nationalism. Study 1 (n = 263) provides correlational evidence that essentialist thinking about the U.S. positively predicted all three ideological variables, as well as support for conservative policies regarding religion, taxes, the environment, and immigration. Converging experiments show that prompting participants to think about the U.S.’s essence increased support for RWA and nationalism, but not SDO. Study 2 (n = 164) compared an essentialist to a non‐essentialist framing of the U.S., while Study 3 (n = 150) compared essentialist framings of the U.S. to an unrelated concept (music). Parallel mediation analyses show that support for RWA and nationalism mediated the relationship between primed national essentialism and support for conservative policy positions. Study 4 (n = 174) directly replicated Study 2 and went further to test mediators, showing that perceptions of intergroup threat mediated the effect of national essentialism on RWA, while national identification mediated the effect of national essentialism on nationalism. Data and materials are publicly available at: (https://osf.io/srvxk/?view_only=d803fbf4c59c4b7e912f5a345ddb09b9)

Fear over facts: how preconceptions explain perceptions of threat following cyberattacks

ABSTRACT Why do cyberattacks elevate perceptions of threat even as they fail to generate truly destructive effects? We argue that people employ motivated reasoning to align cyberattacks with their preconceptions. Fielding a two-wave panel survey immediately before and after a cyberattack on an Israeli hospital, we confirm that motivated reasoning plays a crucial role in how people interpret cyber events. Results show that people already predisposed to perceive cyberattacks as threatening experience a significant increase in perceptions of threat, while those initially viewing cyberattacks as harmless also have their beliefs reinforced. The data reveals how even minor incidents bolster cyber doom convictions.

Avatars at Risk: Exploring Public Response to Sexual Violence in Immersive Digital Spaces

As the metaverse emerges as a new frontier of human interaction, understanding public perceptions of crime in virtual spaces becomes crucial. This study delves into public perceptions of such crimes, focusing on reported incidents of sexual assault in virtual reality environments. We uncover complex dynamics, shaping threat perception in immersive digital realms by analysing YouTube comments through an innovative mixed-methods approach combining machine learning and empirical analysis. Our findings reveal that social norms and expectations are pivotal in influencing perceptions of threats, while technology-mediated interactions correlate with reduced perceived risks. Surprisingly, the oft-discussed blurring of virtual and physical realities shows no significant impact on threat perception. This research contributes to the expanding literature on the social construction of reality and public perception of emerging technologies. The results have implications for the development and governance of metaverse platforms, highlighting the necessity for comprehensive user education initiatives and culturally sensitive approaches to community guidelines and safety features.

Escape behavior of rocky‐reef fish reveals the impact of spearfishing across different management regimes

AbstractFlight initiation distance (FID), the distance at which an organism begins to flee from an approaching threat, is a major component of antipredator escape behavior and a potential indicator of threat perception in fishes. In this study, we analyzed the FID of three important rocky‐reef fish species targeted by spearfishers, which are of commercial and recreational importance. We tested predictions that FID to a diver threat increases with the following factors: (1) fish body size, (2) less restricted access regimes, and (3) increased historical fishing pressure. We studied three size ranges of three rocky‐reef fish species, in three different access regimes (i.e., open access, territorial user rights for fishery areas, no‐take marine protected areas), and in two regions (northern and central region with different levels of fishing pressure depending on the species). We conducted an ANOVA to analyze pairwise interactions. We used the mean square criterion to select the models that best explained the variation of our response variable. Our findings indicate that FID can be distinctly elucidated by factors such as individual size, species, access regimes, and regions. Additionally, our models show that interactions involving regions and either species or size further contribute to explain FID variability. FID was higher in larger fishes and those of higher commercial value, outside marine reserves and in the region with the highest historical fishing pressures (based on landings data). This study supports the predictions that increased FID is associated with the threat posed by spearfishing activities. Furthermore, our findings indicate that spearfishing may already be altering the behavior of rocky‐reef fishes on the north‐central coast of Chile.

Exposure to information about sexual crimes and its relationship to perceptions of social threats and belief in a just world

Purpose The purpose of the two online experimental studies was to examine how information about threats related to sexual crimes influences personal beliefs regarding social threats (in line with the finite pool of worry concept) and belief in a just world, as proposed by Melvin Lerner. Design/methodology/approach In the first experiment (n = 256), female participants were presented with press information about a sexual crime that occurred at a student concert. Different groups were informed whether the perpetrator was apprehended (or not) and asked to indicate the punishment they thought should be imposed. In the second experiment (n = 251), participants in the experimental group were asked to read texts about various threats that may concern them. Findings In both experiments, the authors measured the perceived risk of being a victim of a sexual crime (and, in Study 1, other threats) as well as belief in just world (at both personal and general levels). Analysis of results has shown that participants’ focus on one threat did not reduce their concerns about other threats. However, belief in just world appears to be negatively associated with the fear of being a victim of a sexual crime. Originality/value The findings concern the relationship between the sense of threat and belief in a just world. In this regard, both of the studies consistently showed that the threats the authors induced did not affect the level of belief in a just world. However, the second experiment revealed that belief in a just world is related to the fear of being raped. Belief in a just world serves as a foundation for good adaptation and functioning. It provides cognitive control, motivates hard work and long-term goal-setting and gives life meaning (e.g. Dalbert, 1999; Dalbert and Sallay, 2004; Sutton and Winnard, 2007). Therefore, a woman’s fear of being a victim of rape has implications that extend beyond this narrowly defined issue.

Peer threat evaluations shape one’s own threat perceptions and feelings of distress

ABSTRACT We are continuously exposed to what others think and feel about content online. How do others’ evaluations shared in this medium influence our own beliefs and emotional responses? In two pre-registered studies, we investigated the social transmission of threat and safety evaluations in a paradigm that mimicked online social media platforms. In Study 1 (N = 103), participants viewed images and indicated how distressed they made them feel. Participants then categorised these images as threatening or safe for others to see, while seeing how “previous participants” ostensibly categorised them (these values were actually manipulated across images). We found that participants incorporated both peers’ categorisations of the images and their own distress ratings when categorizing images as threatening or safe. Study 2 (N = 115) replicated these findings and further demonstrated that peers’ categorisations shifted how distressed these images made them feel. Taken together, our results indicate that people integrate their own and others’ experiences when exposed to emotional content and that social information can influence both our perceptions of things as threatening or safe, as well as our own emotional responses to them. Our findings provide replicable experimental evidence that social information is a powerful conduit for the transmission of affective evaluations and experiences.

Nurses' perception of threats to human dignity in caring for patients with COVID-19: A qualitative study

PurposeIdentifying threats to patients' dignity is crucial for maintaining and promoting their dignity. Preserving patient dignity should be regarded as both a patient’s right and a moral obligation. This study was conducted to evaluate nurses' understanding of threats to human dignity in the care of patients with COVID-19. MethodsThis qualitative study was conducted using conventional content analysis in various clinical departments in Iran. Clinical nurses from different departments were selected through purposeful sampling. Data were collected via in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 clinical nurses over two months in 2021 and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. ResultsDuring data analysis, two main categories and ten subcategories were identified: 1) Unethical behaviors (lack of respect for patient privacy, lack of patient involvement in decision-making procedures, ignoring the patient as an individual, aggressive behaviors, stigmatization, and failure to provide palliative and end-of-life care to patients and their families); 2) Organizational factors (inadequate financial support, lack of patient-care facilities, strict restrictions, and employing less experienced nurses in COVID wards). ConclusionThe present study showed that most participants expressed concerns about violations of patients' dignity and identified many threats to it. Based on the findings, it is suggested that other factors threatening patients' dignity be identified, the threats eliminated, and healthy treatment environments created to promote patients' dignity.

Aftermath of the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis: Media Discourse Analysis of Taiwan and India’s Perception of China’s Threat

This study examines Taiwan and India’s media discourse and political elite statements from 1 July 2022 to 1 October 2023, starting from the fourth Taiwan Strait crisis in 2022. We conducted a discourse analysis of over 121,901 news texts using extensive data analysis and text-mining software. Additionally, our research team conducted expert focus group discussions with renowned think tanks and research centres in New Delhi, India. Building upon the data text analysis findings, we further explored India’s stance on the Taiwan Strait conflict, its perception of the Chinese threat and the impact of the ongoing ‘new normal’ crisis on India’s Indo-Pacific strategic layout. The aim was to uncover common security needs and intersecting interests between the two countries, considering their different national interests and geopolitical considerations. Based on the analysis of textual mining and expert discussions, this study reveals the following: First, India is concerned about the current situation in the Taiwan Strait. Second, the current tensions in the Taiwan Strait will influence India’s strategic layout. Third, there is a growing consensus within India regarding the Chinese threat. In light of these findings, this study suggests that Taiwan and India share interests in democratic values, maritime traffic security and high-tech industry supply chains. Taiwan possesses expertise in China studies and a deep understanding of China’s military threat, while Taiwan and India possess specific technological capabilities. Based on these foundations, there are potential opportunities for further dialogue, exchange and cooperation in relevant fields between India and Taiwan.

Public Support for the Accommodation of Religious Diversity: The Interplay Between Religious Identification, Threat Perception, and Cross‐Group Friendships

AbstractAccommodating new religious communities has become a central issue in Western Europe. However, the role of religious identification in shaping intergroup relations still needs to be better understood. This study addresses this gap by analyzing the factors influencing public support for the accommodation of religious diversity, drawing on two statistically representative surveys conducted in Catalonia, Spain. The results revealed that religious identification moderates the relationship between the perception that religions other than Catholicism threaten society's way of life and the level of support for accommodating religious diversity. Contrary to initial assumptions, practicing Catholics were more supportive of religious accommodation than nonpracticing Catholics and nonbelievers, regardless of the level of threat they perceived. Moreover, cross‐group friendships mitigated the negative impact of perceived threat on support for religious accommodation, particularly among nonbelievers. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of cross‐group friendships in fostering more inclusive societies and provide valuable insights for religious governance.

Race, Interests, and Perceptions in International Migration: A Review Article

Abstract The field of international migration has largely ignored race. Does the Global North's apparent warm welcome of mostly white Ukrainian Orthodox Christians fleeing Russia's war and its hostility towards black and brown non-Christan Middle Easterners and Africans escaping war and deprivation tell us anything? Although latecomers to the study of international migration, since the 1990s, political scientists have innovated the field of the politics of international migration but few works locate race as a focal point of analysis in either migration politics or international relations. The study of race in international migration in international relations is still rather nascent and centers on the Western world with a focus on how racial differences influence perception of threat, common identities, and even standards of good governance. Andrew Rosenberg's book Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration offers a corrective to much of this in his examination of race and international migration from the perspective of international relations. It builds on the work of many critical and traditional scholars with a novel quantitative approach that “seeks to unmask” the issue of racial bias against “non-white migrants” primarily from the Global South. (11)

Angry and Afraid: Exploring the Impact of Mixed Emotional Reactions to Hate Crimes With LGBT+ and Muslim Communities.

Hate crimes send messages of intolerance that can cause significant emotional and behavioral harm to entire identity groups. Previous research, based on intergroup emotions theory, has helped explain the psychological mechanisms that underpin the indirect effects of anti-LGBT+ hate crime, showing that incidents give rise to perceptions of threat among community members, which in turn elicit certain emotional reactions that trigger specific behavioral outcomes. This article provides two significant contributions to this developing knowledgebase. First, it provides an important replication of the theoretical model with another frequently targeted community: Muslim people. In addition, it offers the first quantitative analysis of how combinations of different emotions trigger discrete behavioral responses in the aftermath of hate crime, thereby providing much-needed nuance to the intergroup emotions theory model. Across two studies (Study 1: N = 589 LGBT+ participants; Study 2: N = 347 Muslim participants), we show that, for both LGBT+ and Muslim participants, indirect experiences of hate crimes are associated with greater perceptions of threat, which are then positively associated with anger, anxiety, and shame, that link to behavioral intentions: avoidance, pro-action, security behaviors, and retaliation. Latent class analyses further revealed that participants' emotional reactions tend to cluster into four distinct profiles in both communities: people scored mid-range on all emotions, or high anger with low shame, or high anger with high anxiety, or low shame. These combinations had direct implications for intended behaviors across both groups: experiencing high anger with high anxiety was a cogent motivator of action. Most significantly, we provide new insights into how and why different emotions interact to predict both similar and divergent behaviors in the aftermath of hate crime incidents. Our findings yield important new knowledge that holds the potential of shaping both public policies and practices aimed at addressing the impacts of hate crimes.

Us or them: How COVID‐19 vaccine priority influences perceptions of local‐migrant worker relations

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic laid bare pre‐existing societal fault lines, placing immense strain on intergroup relations and giving rise to xenophobic sentiments. Drawing on Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT) and Social Identity Approach (SIA), our study examined how the public allocation of COVID‐19 variant vaccines could influence the dynamics between local citizens and migrant workers, and under what conditions. One key idea is that valued resource distribution that favour migrant workers may produce increased perceptions of realistic threats among local citizens which could lead to exacerbated negative attitudes and behaviours of high‐status local citizens towards low‐status migrants, whereas higher fairness perceptions of such resource distributions could potentially mitigate these negative attitudes and behaviours. To investigate these predictions, we employed a cross‐cultural approach and conducted an experiment in both an Asian country (Malaysia; N = 197) and a Western country (Australia; N = 210). We manipulated vaccine prioritisation, assessed local citizens' perceptions of the realistic threat and fairness of vaccine prioritisation, and measured their attitudinal responses towards migrant workers. Our results showed that the perceived unfairness in migrant‐favouring vaccine prioritisation, rather than realistic threat, negatively affected local citizens' perceptions of the migrant workers. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of intergroup relations.

The Beowulf Group: Taking the lead to defend Europe

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has exposed divisions in European strategic culture and threat perception. The search for a lowest-common-denominator response to the threat has hampered the European reply to the Russian aggression, often forcing the EU to move at the speed of its slowest member, whether in supplying ammunition and equipment to Ukraine or setting up the defence industry needed to accelerate such a supply in the future. Notwithstanding the importance of keeping a broad coalition together, this article argues that it is now time to create a vanguard of like-minded European nations, led by France, Poland and, though not an EU member, the UK, but open to other states, which can force the creation of a new strategic culture able to meet the Russian threat. This ‘Beowulf Group’, named after the Danish hero from the Anglo-Saxon epic who stood up to the marauding monster Grendel, could establish a Strategic College for Europe, a joint Elite European Reserve Legion and a strategic communications centre, to move European policy in a more active direction.

Barriers of persistent long-lasting insecticidal nets utilization in Northwest Ethiopia: a qualitative study

BackgroundMalaria continues a significant public health challenge in Ethiopia, with Long-Lasting Insecticidal Nets (LLINs) proving effective in reducing transmission. Despite their effectiveness, consistent LLIN utilization is influenced by various factors. While previous research has quantitatively analyzed LLIN ownership and usage, there is a lack of in-depth examination of the behavioral, sociocultural, socioeconomic, and distribution-related factors affecting their sustained use. This study aimed to explore barriers to persistent LLIN use among communities in northwest Ethiopia.MethodsThe study area found in Northwest Ethiopia, specifically in East Belessa District, is located at 12° 14’ 60.00” N latitude and 37° 44’ 59.99” E longitude, with an altitude between 1,200 and 1,800 m above sea level. Thirty-nine community members from five focus group discussions, along with five key informants, were interviewed between February 1st and 30th, 2020, about their use of Long-Lasting Insecticidal Nets (LLINs). An interpretive description approach was employed to explore local contexts and factors affecting LLIN utilization. Focus group participants were selected based on residency status, pregnancy, caretaking of under-five children, and experience with LLINs. Key informants included health extension workers and the woreda malaria officer. Data were organized and analyzed using Open Code Version 4.03 software, with coding and theme identification conducted accordingly.ResultsAll 44 community members from the five focus group discussions and the five key informants participated fully in the study. The study categorized its findings into three main themes: knowledge of malaria and Long-Lasting Insecticidal Nets (LLIN) use, perception of malaria threat, and barriers to sustained LLIN utilization. It identified factors spanning individual, socio-cultural, institutional, and socio-economic realms that impede consistent LLIN usage. Key hindrances include cultural misinterpretations, discomfort from heat and bed bugs, diverse net shapes, insufficient sleeping spaces, lack of awareness, inadequate distribution, neglect of vulnerable groups, misuse of non-sleeping purposes, hesitancy to hang nets, and restricted accessibility.ConclusionsThis study reveals that practical concerns, including inadequate access to LLINs, distribution issues, discomfort from net shape and warmth, and unintended uses for non-malaria purposes, impact LLIN utilization. Socio-cultural norms, housing conditions, and varied understanding of malaria also contribute to inconsistent LLIN use. Strategies like providing compatible nets and comprehensive education could improve the Long-Lasting Insecticidal Nets program’s effectiveness in the area.

A Comprehensive Framework for Machine Learning-Based Threat Intelligence in Health Information Systems

This research work provides a comprehensive architecture of Machine Learning based threat intelligence particularly for Health Information System (HIS). The number of cybersecurity threats executed by healthcare companies is even higher since healthcare organizations continue to introduce digitized data into medical data. This work employs complex machine learning techniques from the MIMIC-III Critical Care Database to develop a practical threat identification and mitigation system. In this case, the strategy of analysis involves selection of data, data processing, modeling and real time dangers identification considering both supervised and unsupervised learning. The results reveal that the proposed framework covers high performance indicators such as: accuracy that equals 97.92%, and the level of precision and recall which also equal 90% ROC AUC has reached 0.94. These results demonstrate that the framework can identify and categorise cybersecurity risks in systems of health information on a regular basis. It not only increases threat perception but also makes the system internally valuable for healthcare IT professionals since it contains real-time monitoring and anomaly detection functionality. Therefore, this study stands in support of the ongoing efforts to enhance the security of the healthcare bodies on the use of policies on cybersecurity so as to ensure the protection of individual patient’s information against new forms of threats.

Soviet Interference Influence on the Mexican Federal Security Directorate (DFS), 1947–1985

The Mexican Federal Security Directorate (DFS) was established not only to counter domestic opposition but also to address Soviet interference during the Cold War. This intervention, often overlooked by scholars, took the form of subsidies to the Communist Party, training of subversives, recruitment of agents, and other less studied covert actions. While the single-party regime shaped the presidents’ perception of threats and officers’ recruitment until the mid-1960s, it was the silent war between U.S. and Soviet intelligence that primarily influenced the DFS as an organization. Contrary to the traditional narrative, the agency resorted to extrajudicial action only when extensive surveillance and patronage failed, adopting a case-approach type of analysis, tactical products, and strong liaison with the Central Intelligence Agency.