Participation on Online Social Networks (OSNs) inherently requires information sharing and thus exposes individuals to privacy risks. Risk mitigation then has been encouraged through adoption of usable privacy controls. However, stronger privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) decrease both risk and perceptions of risk. Thus, individuals feel safer and may in fact respond by accepting more risk. ...

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is still the leading cause of death and disability worldwide despite the availability of well-established and effective preventive options. Accurate perception of a patient's risk by both the patient and the doctors is important as this is one of the components that determine health-related behavior. Doctors tend to not use cardiovascular (CV) risk calculators and u...

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The legislative gaps in international eCommerce and specifically in the gambling industry mean that many consumers face the market condition of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). In terms of consumer psychology, caveat emptor increases consumer perceptions of risk and slows the diffusion of Internet gambling. This paper discusses the specific risks associated with Internet gambling and prese...

Research on environmental health risks suggests that public perceptions of risk may be greater than quantitative health risk assessments, especially amongst vulnerable groups such as women and immigrants. This study uses the environmental stress and coping framework to examine individual perceptions of air quality amongst Canadian-born and immigrant women in Northeast Hamilton, Ontario, Canada....

One significant challenge in creating accurate models of human decision behavior is accounting for the effect of context. Research shows that seemingly minor changes in the presentation of a decision can lead to drastic shifts in behavior; phenomena collectively referred to as framing effects. Previous work has developed Context Dependent Utility (CDU), a framework integrating Appraisal Theory ...

This study examines a key component of environmental risk communication; trust and credibility. The study was conducted in two parts. In the first part, six hypotheses regarding the perceptions and determinants of trust and credibility were tested against survey data. The hypotheses were supported by the data. The most important hypothesis was that perceptions of trust and credibility are depen...

The purpose of the present thesis was, first, to study how parents and other adults percieve or judge children’s accident risk, and, secondly, to relate such judgem ents to the subjects’ preferences for and satisfaction with different residential conditions. A theoretical framework is proposed which assumes that judgem ents o f children’s accident risk are based on beliefs about what causes acc...