The Impact of the 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Subsequent Nuclear Accident: A Preliminar y Interview Study among South Korean People

The present study examined the impact of the 2011 East Japan earthquake and subsequent nuclear accident on people in a neighboring country using a semi-structured interview. Twenty Korean women participated in 5-member group interview sessions conducted in Seoul regarding changes in attitudes and behaviors following the 2011 disasters. The results showed that most participants were afraid of radiation exposure from Fukushima. More than half the participants expressed a negative reaction to having a nuclear power plant in their country. Some participants stopped purchasing cosmetic products and food from Japan. In addition, almost all participants estimated that panic would occur in a future national emergency. These reactions indicated anxiety and mistrust about the risk of exposure to radiation in South Korea even one year after the events. We believe that the occurrence of a nuclear accident after a great earthquake and tsunami and repeated coverage of the event by the media reinforced the terrible nature of the events which led to prolonging residents’ fear and anxiety. Two experiments were conducted to establish normative values for various measures of endogenous blink activities in each age and gender group, using relatively large samples and similar tasks. The ages of participants in Experiment 1 ranged from 3 months to 3 years and in Experiment 2 from 5 to 93 years. Video recording was performed during quiet resting for the former three age groups and an identical task of video watching was delivered to the latter 11 age groups. The major results were as follows: 1) the youngest infants blink infrequently, increasing gradually until the age of 9–10 years, with no statistical differences for the older age groups, 2) no differences in blink durations of closing, reopening, and total blink were obtained throughout all age groups in Experiment 2, whereas three age groups of infants aged less than 3 years in Experiment 1 showed some differences, and 3) the distribution patterns of blink frequency in each age group were roughly divided into three types. Many studies have shown that brand cues affect not only qualitative product evaluation, but also hedonic evaluation of food and beverage products. Although most research has focused on familiar brands associated with cultural or affective values (e.g., Coke, McDonalds, and Starbucks), only a few studies have examined the categorical aspects of brands that lead consumers to associate one product with other products from the same brand. In the present study, we hypothesized that if palatability evaluations of a beverage transfer to those of a novel beverage from the same brand, hedonic transfer will occur . We designed two experiments to test this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, each participant tasted and evaluated two beverages sequentially. The first was a context (hedonically negative) beverage and the second was a target (hedonically neutral) beverage, with or without information indicating these two beverages were from the same brand. In Experiment 2, each participant tasted and evaluated a context (hedonically neutral) beverage and target (hedonically negative) beverage, with or without the information. The results from Experiment 1 showed that participants who were informed that the two beverages were the same brand evaluated the target beverage as less palatable than did those without brand information; in other words, negative hedonic transfer occurred. In contrast, Experiment 2 did not show any indication of positive hedonic transfer. The results indicate that even if the brand does not have cultural value or familiarity, brand cues affect the palatability of a beverage, based on brand categorization and hedonic transfer.