Home values have plummeted. Stock prices have spiraled down and down again. Job security is iffy, and banks are teetering on the brink.

When the dust settles from the current economic upheaval, will the American psyche be forever altered?

''This is the kind of generational event that changes people's fundamental attitudes,'' said Brett Steenbarger, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at SUNY Upstate Medical University who studies market psychology. ``I think the aftershocks will be with us for quite a substantial time.''

Beliefs woven into the fabric of American life -- from the idea that a home is a rock-solid retirement asset to the adage that stocks always make money in the long run to the notion that markets should be left unfettered -- all have been thrown into doubt.

Tony Hatcher, 49, a Miami construction contractor nursing a cup of coffee at a Starbucks in Coral Gables one recent morning, said he sold $37,000 in stock at a loss as the market spiraled down. He has no intention of diving back into the stock market any time soon and has tightened his belt for hard times ahead.

''Things are so bleak, especially in my line of work in the construction business. Everything has come to a grinding halt,'' Hatcher said. ``I'm trying not to spend, and I try just to pay cash for whatever I need. I might not have work for the next year and a half.''

When the go-go days of the 1920s gave way to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, more than a generation of Americans responded by building nest eggs and avoiding waste and excess. Back then, ''you always understood the possibility of getting in financial trouble and losing your job,'' said Elliot A. Rosen, a professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University and author of Roosevelt, the Great Depression and the Economics of Recovery. ``But in the last 20 or 25 years, we have a generation that isn't saving but instead is living over its head.''

The personal savings rate -- or the percentage of disposable income set aside for savings -- is below 1.0 percent, the lowest level since the Great Depression, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. And debt levels are at record highs.

Will Americans, chastened by the dramatic economic events still unfolding around the world, shift their outlook and behavior? Some say thrift -- which has been viewed largely as a quaint, 19th-century notion lately -- will make a comeback as a survival strategy. But whether it comes into vogue is another question.

'THRIFT' SELDOM-USED

' `Thrift' has faded from our vocabulary. Now it's only used with second-hand clothing stores,'' said Joshua J. Yates, research assistant professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He studies thrift in American society. ''We have to see whether it will be just a survival tactic or an animating force in society,'' he said.

''With this massive financial crisis, people are not only angry and bewildered, but they are forced to go into a severe belt-tightening mode,'' said Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, lead author of For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture, a study sponsored by the Institute for American Values, a New York-based think tank. ``It's an enforced type of thrift. What choice do we have?''

As for the stock market, some say a whole generation of potential investors may be sidelined. ''A lot of people will be keeping their money under the mattress for a few years,'' said Dr. Richard L. Peterson, a psychiatrist who manages MarketPsy Capital, a hedge fund in Brentwood, Calif.

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