How Self-Involvement affects miners' safety risk Decision-Making: an ERP study

Area of Science:

• Occupational safety and health
• Cognitive neuroscience
• Mining engineering

Background:

• Unsafe decisions in coal mining pose significant risks to individuals and the entire operation.
• Previous research primarily focused on self-risk scenarios, neglecting the impact of risks affecting others.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how miners' decision-making in self-involved versus non-self-involved safety risk scenarios is influenced by their level of unsafe psychology.
• To explore the neurophysiological underpinnings of these decisions using event-related potentials (ERPs).

Main Methods:

• Combined questionnaire surveys to assess unsafe psychology with an event-related potential (ERP) experiment.
• Miners evaluated safety risks in both self-involved and non-self-involved scenarios.

Main Results:

• Behaviorally, both low and high unsafe psychology groups made more unsafe decisions in non-self-involved scenarios.
• ERP analysis showed significant P300 and Late Positive Component (LPC) amplitudes, higher in self-involved scenarios, indicating increased attention.
• Miners with low unsafe psychology exhibited distinct P300 characteristics in self-involved scenarios, suggesting deeper cognitive processing.

Conclusions:

• Self-involvement plays a critical role in safety risk decision-making within the mining context.
• Neurophysiological data (P300, LPC) provide novel insights into the cognitive and emotional factors affecting mining safety behavior.
• Understanding these factors is crucial for developing targeted safety interventions.