Abstract:

Understanding the dynamics of human psychological recovery from traumatic events is a question of interest for fields ranging from psychology to neuroscience to medicine, and of practical importance for governments, NGOs, and aid agencies. While risk communications and primary care (e.g., therapy, pharmacology) have featured prominently in traditional post-disaster relief efforts; there has been less emphasis in developing strategies that utilize victims’ psychological immune system to spontaneously motivate recovery from trauma. We combined geophysical- and mobile phone-based field data (communications, mobility, internet, app usage) of 157,358 survivors of the 2013 Ya’an earthquake (M_s7.0) to map social and behavioral recovery patterns after the disaster. The earthquake provided a natural experiment linking intensity (physical shaking) experienced to specific changes in individual-level post-disaster behavior, on a population scale, which revealed three prominent patterns. First, in line with social support theory, higher earthquake intensity resulted in increased social communications. Second, contrary to intuition that disasters are primarily negatively valenced, higher intensity led to increased hedonic activities (e.g., music, videos, games), which in turn reduced perceived risk after the earthquake. A field experiment tests this relationship, which is consistent with the notion that mesolimbic dopamine can motivate pleasure seeking in both positive and negative situations. Third, in line with literature on the psychological immune system, overall social and mobile activity began returning to pre-disaster levels ~10 days after the earthquake, suggesting that psychological recovery started faster than physical or environmental recovery. Overall, post-disaster behavior intuits a multi-pronged and relatively rapid psychological recovery process in which pleasure plays an important role in risk reduction, suggesting that hedonics may be an adaptive coping strategy and crucial missing element for crisis management.