Towards the development of Dynamic Networked Psychology Hypotheses

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.