• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A description of Darren Laur’s knife-attack experiment can be found here: Darren Laur, “The Anatomy of Fear and How It Relates to Survival Skills Training,” http://www.lwcbooks.com/articles/anatomy.htm.

For the study on the brains of meditators, see Sara W. Lazar et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Increased Cortical Thickness,” NeuroReport.

On the importance of control, real and imagined, see J. Amat et al., “Medial Prefrontal Cortex Determines How Stressor Controllability Affects Behavior and Dorsal Raphe Nucleus,” Nature Neuroscience 8, no. 3 (Mar. 2005).

Rosemberg Pabón, aka Commandante Uno

The quotes from Pabón, the hostage-taker-turned-government-functionary, come from the only interview I did not do myself. Sibylla Brodzinsky, a reporter in Bogotá, conducted the interview on my behalf, and I am grateful for her excellent work.

CHAPTER 4: RESILIENCE

Resilience Defined

Over the past five years or so, disaster researchers and trauma psychologists have begun to focus more on the people who recover from disasters—instead of the people who don’t. This is a massive and important shift, and it comes, naturally, with jargon. In clinical and research circles, the words resilience, recovery, resistance, and hardiness are all separate but related concepts. Because this is a book for the layperson, I hope the experts will forgive me for using the word resilience to mean, in a way, all of the above. Resilience, in this book, refers to whatever it is that makes some people able to perform extraordinarily well during a disaster—and then recover relatively quickly and fully afterward. For more on resilience, see Al Siebert, The Survivor Personality.

Physical Fitness

For more on the effect of obesity in car accidents, see Charles N. Mock et al., “The Relationship Between Body Weight and Risk of Death and Serious Injury in Motor Vehicle Crashes,” Accident Analysis and Prevention 34, no. 2 (Mar. 2002): 221–228.

The increased odds of people with low physical ability getting injured on 9/11 comes from Gershon’s survey of Trade Center evacuees.

Gender

For more on how race and gender subtly shape our risk equation, see Dan M. Kahan et al., “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect in Risk Perception,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

The Oxfam study on the female victims of the tsunami is here: Oxfam International, “The Tsunami’s Impact on Women,” Oxfam Briefing Note (Mar. 2005).

The greater likelihood for females to have been injured in the Trade Center comes from Gershon’s survey data.

Poverty

The data on African American and American Indian fire fatalities come from U.S. Fire Administration/National Fire Data Center, Fire in the United States 1992–2001, 13th edition (Emmitsburg, MD: U.S. Fire Administration, Oct. 2004).

For more on the effect of poverty on disasters worldwide, see James McCarthy et al., eds., “Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Insurance and Other Financial Services (2001), 451–486; and Matthew E. Kahn, “The Death Toll from Natural Disasters: The Role of Income, Geography and Institutions,” Review of Economics and Statistics 87, no. 2 (May 2005): 271–284.

The comparison between the Northridge and the Pakistani earthquake was made by geophysicist John C. Mutter in the following article: Claudia Dreifus, “Earth Science Meets Social Science in Study of Disasters,” New York Times, Mar. 14, 2006, Science Desk.

Arrogance

For more on resilience overall and the survival value of self-confidence specifically, see George A. Bonanno, “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?” American Psychologist 59, no. 1 (Jan. 2004): 20–28.

Military Research

For more on Charles Morgan’s study of soldiers at Survival School, see Charles A. Morgan III et al., “Plasma Neuropeptide-Y Concentrations in Humans Exposed to Military Survival Training,” Biological Psychiatry