4. Boil down the following news release, and write a brief news story.
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY NEWS
News and Information Services
Baltimore, Maryland 21218
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Lisa Hooker
(301) 338-7160
DONORS’ FIRST BLOOD IS OFTEN THEIR LAST, SAYS HOPKINS PSYCHOLOGIST
“Almost half of the people in this country have donated blood at least once,” said Steven Breckler, associate professor of psychology at The Johns Hopkins University, “but the vast majority of those people have donated only once, and most of them will never donate again.”
Breckler, named a Presidential Young Investigator earlier this year by the National Science Foundation, currently is working to determine why this is so, and to find ways of converting one-time blood donors to the ranks of veteran donors. Supported by a grant from the American Red Cross, Breckler and graduate student Beth Wiggins plan to follow Maryland bloodmobiles to a number of blood-collection centers, including drives at churches, industrial centers, and military headquarters. They already have visited blood drives at Hopkins’ own Glass Pavilion, where they began their research two and a half years ago.
A major factor in one-time donors’ unwillingness to give again, Breckler believes, is that they are likely to remember only the bad things about their first experience. The temporary high, the “warm glow,” one gets from donating blood is short-lived: “A couple of days or weeks later, what you tend to remember are the most salient aspects of having donated blood, the dizziness and the inconvenience.”
Breckler also noted that the Red Cross tries to downplay the possibility of a donor’s feeling dizzy or weak after giving blood, whereas in fact many people experience these reactions. A frank explanation of how he can expect to feel, he said, could make a neophyte donor more comfortable with his experience, and thus encourage him to return.
A Harris poll of more than 1,200 people concluded that 46 percent had donated blood once. However, the Red Cross is able to persuade only 14 percent of all first-time donors to return.
Although the advent of the AIDS crisis caused a temporary dip in the levels of blood being donated, Breckler said, it appears to have had little lasting effect on people’s willingness to give.
Breckler and Wiggins originally took verbal reports from donors for their studies, but they now plan to employ more sophisticated methods for measuring responses, including the analysis of facial expression and tone of voice. The Facial Action Coding System, for example, provides a means for quantifying facial expressions by looking at the movement or setting of various muscles.
With FACS, every muscle in the face is coded, and reactions are determined by which muscles are used in an expression. “Facial expressions often give you away, and it’s frequently possible to tell even if people are faking, because a fake smile often involves different muscles than a real smile.”
Donors may often hide their true feelings about giving blood when asked, because they want to appear brave and generous, Breckler said. In reality, they may be feeling fear, disgust or pain.
The results of his studies of blood donors, Breckler believes, have significant implications for the field of attitude theory. He has found, for instance, that there is a much stronger relationship between donors’ emotions and their behavior than between their thoughts and beliefs and their behavior.
“That’s a very interesting result,” he said, “because a lot of social psychology and psychology in general is guided by the assumption that behavior is rationally determined, that you think and you intend to do things, and then you do them. But we’ve found emotion weighs even more heavily than beliefs.”