Terrorist attacks can occur anywhere. As the threat of terrorism develops, the China-Eurasia Expo held in Ürümqi, China is attracting fewer potential visitors. A nationwide survey of 2034 residents from 31 provinces and municipalities in China was conducted to examine the relation between the distance to respondents’ city of residence from Ürümqi and their levels of concern for safety and security concerning the Expo. The two were found to be positively related: the closer the respondents lived to Ürümqi, the less concerned they were with the safety and security of the Expo. This is consistent with the “psychological typhoon eye” effect, which states that people living closer to the center of an unfortunate event (whether natural or man-made hazards) are less concerned with the event’s negative consequences. This effect appears to hold for terrorism. There are implications of this finding for international counter-terrorism practice, tourism, and research.

Social identity theory shows that individuals’ social identity can become salient in some contexts and affect their cognition and behavior. Little research has focused on the impact of ethnic identity salience on the group-reference effect in the remembering-knowing recognition task. Thus, the current study aims to examine this effect of ethnic identity salience. In Experiment 1 we recruited 26 Tibetan students and 30 Han Chinese students from a predominantly Han Chinese university. In Experiment 2, we selected 26 Tibetan students and 30 Han Chinese students from a predominantly Tibetan university. Two weeks before the experiment, all participants reported the baseline level of their social identity salience. After two weeks, each participant underwent a memory test. Tibetan students at the predominantly Han Chinese university showed evidence of higher ethnic identity salience and superior recognition memory performance during a Tibetan reference encoding task than during a Han Chinese reference encoding task (Experiment 1). However, Tibetan students at the Tibetan-majority university did not show this effect (Experiment 2). In comparison, Han Chinese participants did not show any social identity salience in the two experiments. The results show that the salient social identity had an effect on the group reference effect in a remembering-recognition memory test. The current study contributes to the past literature by providing a tentative further understanding of the relationship between social identity salience and remembering judgments.