Towards the development of Dynamic Networked Psychology Hypotheses

TL;DR

This paper proposes a theoretical framework called Dynamic Networked Psychology (DNP) to understand emotional contagion and coping mechanisms in individuals and communities during disasters, integrating social influence theories and computational social science methods.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of DNP as a new theoretical framework for disaster psychology, emphasizing network dynamics and social influence to study emotional contagion and coping.

Findings

Framework facilitates understanding of emotional contagion in disasters

Highlights role of network dynamics in community resilience

Suggests computational social science methods for empirical analysis

Abstract

Individual and community psychology plays an important role in disaster management as human behavior exhibit diverse risk perceptions, recognition of the threats that exists, positive and negative emotions, panic, anger, rumor, stress and learned helplessness. These psychological factors are important as lack of attention to these can lead to detrimental outcome of disaster management effort. Disaster psychology has been seen as an emerging area of research and practice which deals with understanding of the psychological impact of individuals and community aftermath of the disasters. The aim of this paper is to put forward the conceptualization and development of dynamic networked psychology as a theoretical framework and its implications in exploring emotional contagion during disasters. We advocate theories of structural network dynamics can be used to construct DNP for exploring individuals as well as community coping mechanisms for improving preparedness, response and recovery of disasters. The advent of computational social science promotes the empirical modelling and analysis of massive volume of user data by inferring meaningful patterns for finding answers to important social and behavioral science research questions dealing with individual and community coping ability. In presenting a theoretical framework, we suggest that the underlying assumptions and integration of theories of social influence can be used to explore networks of emotional contagion for disasters.