In the present article, the authors report on the development of a scale for the measurement of the militant extremist mind-set. A previous pilot study identified 56 statements selected from writings of various terrorist groups as well as from psychological, historical, and political texts on terrorism. These statements, together with measures of personality, social attitudes, values, and social cynicism, were administered to participants from 9 countries (N = 2,424). A series of exploratory factor analyses of 56 statements produced 3 factors: Proviolence, Vile World, and Divine Power. Correlations of these factors with external variables indicate that Divine Power is a traditional religiosity scale, whereas Proviolence and Vile World scales cannot be accounted for by the existing psychological constructs. The distribution of scores on the Proviolence scale is skewed, indicating that the majority of participants disapprove of this attitude. The authors also present means for the countries included in the analysis. Participants from Malaysia endorse Vile World and Divine Power statements stronger than participants from other countries. The 3 Asian countries (China, Korea, and Malaysia) endorse Proviolence more strongly than countries from other parts of the world.
The purpose of this study was to analyze people's attitudes to disasters by investigating how people feel, behave and think during disasters. We focused on disasters induced by humans, such as terrorist attacks. Two types of textual information were collected - from Internet blogs and from research papers. The analysis enabled forecasting of attitudes for the design of proactive disaster advisory scheme. Text was analyzed using a text mining tool, Leximancer. The outcome of this analysis revealed core themes and concepts in the text concerning people's attitudes. The themes and concepts were sorted into three broad categories: Affect, Behaviour, and Cognition (ABC), and the data was visualized in semantic maps. The maps reveal several knowledge pathways of ABC for developing attitudinal ontologies, which describe the relations between affect, behaviour and cognition, and the sequence in which they develop. Clearly, terrorist attacks induced trauma and people became highly vulnerable.