• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2015.10a
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• pp.138-141
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• 2015

The South Korean construction industry has shown a high proportion of industrial accidents (approximately 28% of whole injuries) and the continuously increasing accident rate. Although many safety research emphasized that the 3E (Enforcement, Education, and Engineering) approach is a potential solution to enhance workplace safety, there should be benefits to consider psychological (i.e., Emotional) effects on the safety performance since most construction works are human-oriented. Thus, understanding construction workers' psychological conditions can be a priority. This research studied the relationships between psychological conditions-which cover stress, personal temperament, emotional disturbance, and drinking habit-and specific safety-related factors including safety motivation and knowledge, and safety performance of individual workers at a construction site. This study conducted a survey of 430 respondents and analyzed the data with the multiple linear regressions. The results imply persistence, trait anxiety, and problem-focused coping style are the critical factors that should be controlled for enhancing jobsite safety. Finally, the research outcomes could be applied to build a strategic safety management plan for a construction manager.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.167-207
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• 2015

This study focused on the awareness and coping methods of psychological trauma and human suffering in the contemporary era after the development of posttraumatic stress disorder(PTSD) including the situations in the Korean society, and proposed principles for an alternative paradigm of trauma recovery. Trauma is defined as an 'external' stress causing chronic suffering mediated by memory, and the American Psychiatric Association approved PTSD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. The development of PTSD empowered moral legitimacy to the victims, opened a successful way to treatment, and accomplished explosive amount of research in the area of neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience. However, this also narrowed the understanding of human suffering, and the importance of an alternative coping method which overcomes the limitations of technical intervention became overlooked. Moreover, the Korean society has an underlying mechanism of replacing the matter of trauma to a problem of an individual. This is shown among the historical context of splitting and denial, and among medicalized bureaucracy. Trauma should be acknowledged as a social suffering, and searching for an alternative paradigm is in need. This study suggested the following principles; seeking for truth and justice, survivor as the agent of recovery emphasizing the responsibility of the community, ecological adaptations of recent bio-psychological achievements, and finally putting emphasis on continuous discussions about the definition of recovery.