REPRESSION-SENSITIZATION AND FLOOD HAZARD APPRAISAL IN CARMAN, MANITOBA

ship have occurred in Carman, Manitoba, a Canadian settlement of about 2400 located on the Boyne River, 50 miles southwest of Winnipeg, in 1970, 1974, and 1979. 116 floodplain residents were interviewed concerning their perceptions of, feelings about, and responses to the possibiliry of future flooding as well as completing the Rwised Repression-Sensitization Scale. Repressers evidenced a higher incidence of measures taken to micigate against the effects of future floods. Verbalized negative emotions in response to flood hazard occurred less frequently in extreme repressers and sensitizers than in respondents classified as neutral. Natural hazards have plagued human existence throughout history. Public action has ranged from various forms of "strucrural" responses that are meant to protect individuals and propeq from injury and damage to "adjustment" measures involving such alternatives as land-use zoning, eady warning systems, emergency measures and compensation. But what of the potential hazard victim? Little is known about how such people perceive these threats and react to them. A review of the accessible literature indicated that Saarinen (1966) used a modified Thematic Apperception Test to ascertain farmers' attitudes toward drought, while Sims and Baumann ( 1972 ) employed a sentence-completion test to compare the responses of residents of Illinois and Alabama to tornadoes. Simpson-Housley, et al. (1978) repotted that locus of control was associated with responses to flood threat in Lumsden, Saskatchewan, Canada. The dimension of repression-sensitization is of interest since it represents an attempt to conceptualize characteristic ways of avoiding dealing with directly threatening, anxiety-evoking situations along a unidimensional continuum of defense (Byrne, 1964). At one extreme, repressers are presented as persons who attempt to deny and minimize the existence of threat, fail to verbalize feelings of anxiety, and avoid considering the consequences of the threat. At the opposite extreme, sensitizers are viewed as approaching the threat by way of intellectualization and obsessive and ruminative worry. "The individual is acutely attuned to the presence of threatening stimuli, freely