Examining interrelationships between the Cigarette Purchase Task and delay discounting among pregnant women

Two common behavioral economic simulation tasks used to study cigarette smoking are the Cigarette Purchase Task, a measure of cigarette demand, and delay discounting, a measure of the subjective value of rewards as a function of delays to delivery. Few studies have evaluated whether combining these tasks enhances understanding of smoking beyond either alone. The current study represents an initial evaluation of the intersection between cigarette demand indices and delay discounting among pregnant smokers by examining associations between these measures and whether a woman makes antepartum quit attempts before entering prenatal care (a reliable predictor of eventual quitting). Participants were 159 pregnant women enrolled in a smoking‐cessation trial. Low O _max and shallow discounting were each associated with antepartum quit attempts. Participants were next categorized into four subgroups (low O _max, shallow discounting; low O _max, steep discounting; high O _max, shallow discounting; high O _max, steep discounting) using median splits. Those with shallow discounting and low O _max were more likely to have made quit attempts than each of the other three subgroups. That is, steep discounting appears to undermine the association of low O _max and efforts to quit smoking during pregnancy while high O _max overshadows any protective influence associated with shallow discounting.     

Preference Reversals in Monetary and Life Expectancy Evaluations

Two experiments demonstrate a new type of preference reversal. In life expectancy evaluations, health items (e.g., a new treatment that would give you perfect 20/20 vision) were preferred to commodities (e.g., 1 day of vacation in Bermuda), but in monetary evaluations, commodities were preferred to health items. These reversals result from the pattern of similarity of commodities and health items to money and life expectancy and are therefore an example of Tversky, Sattath, and Slovic′s (1988) semantic compatibility principle.     

The role of internal reference prices in consumers' willingness to pay judgments: Thaler's Beer Pricing Task revisited

Alternative reference prices, either displayed in the environment (external) or recalled from memory (internal) are known to influence consumer judgments and decisions. In one line of previous research, internal reference prices have been defined in terms of general price expectations. However, Thaler (Marketing Science 4 (1985) 199; Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 12 (1999) 183) defined them as fair prices expected from specific types of seller. Using a Beer Pricing Task, he found that seller context had a substantial effect on willingness to pay, and concluded that this was due to specific internal reference prices evoked by specific contexts. In a think aloud study using the same task (N = 48), we found only a marginal effect of seller context. In a second study using the Beer Pricing Task and seven analogous ones (N = 144), general internal reference prices were estimated by asking people what they normally paid for various commodities. Both general internal reference prices and seller context influenced willingness to pay, although the effect of the latter was again rather small. We conclude that general internal reference prices have a greater impact in these scenarios than specific ones, because of the lower cognitive load involved in their storage and retrieval.     

Differences in Delay Discounting of Some Commodities as a Function of Church Attendance

Recent research has suggested that the positive benefits of religiousness that are reported in the literature may be related to “self-control.” The present study attempted to determine whether religiousness, as measured by self reporting of regularly attending church services, would be related to how participants discount delayed outcomes. Three hundred one university students completed a delay-discounting task involving five commodities (1,000,1,000, 100,000, annual retirement income, federal education legislation, and medical treatment). Participants who reported regularly attending church services discounted both monetary amounts significantly more than did participants who reported not regularly attending church services, indicating that church goers placed less value on those commodities than non-church goers. Rates of delay discounting did not differ between groups for the other commodities. These results suggest that religiousness alters how people frame certain decisions involving delayed outcomes, but not others.     

更优更耐心：质量结果对跨期选择的影响

跨期选择以往的研究集中于金钱数量结果。基于维度加工的模型,本文探究了在跨期选择中,人们面对质量差异的结果（如今天的低配版手机还是六个月后的高配版手机）与相对应的金钱结果（如今天的5000元还是六个月后的6000元）的选择偏好差异。三个实验结果表明：人们面对质量结果（相比于金钱结果）的跨期选择表现得更耐心,而这种现象是由于人们面对选择时在结果维度差异感知不同所致。与金钱结果跨期选择相同,质量结果跨期选择的心理加工过程同样遵循维度间差异比较。本研究为基于维度的跨期选择模型提供了新的证据。     

Consumerism and identity: Some psychoanalytical considerations

Abstract

The author examines the role that the buying of commodities plays in the identity formation of the individual. He concludes that it is nowadays no longer the instrumental utility value but a psychical utility value that influences the decision to buy a commodity and that the psychical utility value can have different functions for consumers. In neurotically structured individuals, normal consuming can end in an identity extension where the individual identifies transitively unconscious scenes with those in advertisements, thus making these unconscious scenes conscious in their guise. When individuals are mainly narcissistically structured, an “identity of commodities” can be found, that is, a non-personal identity formation mediated by commodities in which the individuals identify reflexively with the scenic figures from Internet games, movies, television programs, and commercials.     

Love: gloriously amoral and arational

I argue that an evaluational conception of love collides with the way we value love. That way allows that love has causes, but not reasons, and it recognizes and celebrates a love that refuses to justify itself. Love has unjustified selectivity, due to its arbitrary causes. That imposes a non-tradability norm. A love for reasons, rational love or evaluational love would be propositional, and it therefore allows that the people we love are tradable commodities. A moralized conception of love is no less committed to treating those we love as tradable commodities; it is just that they are tradable moral commodities. An evaluative criterion of adequacy, I suggest, encourages the opposite view – a non-rational and non-evaluational concept of love. Such a love can set up partial obligations, which may even demand that one sacrifice one's life. Only a love that has causes but not reasons can have the kind of value that we think love has, and thus it would only be rational to pursue and foster such a love.     

Music CD Purchase Decisions

The increasing ease and frequency of digital music piracy and the global nature of the music industry make it important to understand why consumers in different national markets purchase music CDs. Study 1 identified 5 factors underlying CD purchasing, noting these differences between British and Japanese participants. Study 2 investigated relationships between these 5 factors and individual-difference variables. Compliance was unrelated to scores on the Friendship factor. Experience seeking and scores on the Re-Experience the Music factor were correlated negatively. Scores on the Friendship factor and innovativeness were unrelated, although innovativeness and scores on the Need to Control and Be Involved With Music factor were positively associated with product, purchase decision, and consumption involvements. Implications for marketing and future research are discussed.     

冲动性购买行为的研究综述

冲动性购买行为是消费行为研究的热点问题之一。因为冲动性购买涉及到的心理过程比较复杂 ,所以研究者对于冲动性购买概念的界定一直缺乏一致性。本文讨论了非计划性购买、冲动性购买与强迫性购买三种行为 ,探讨了当前研究方法的局限性 ,总结了以往关于冲动性购买的内在心理机制的研究 ,并探讨了今后可能的研究方向     

Task Skills

The need for ongoing development and use of stan- dardized patient evaluations is discussed. Possible reasons that these are not being used are explored. Finally, a case example demon- strates the use of the Assessment of Occupational Functioning (1st rev.) (Brollier & Watts, 1985).     

Task switching

Everyday life requires frequent shifts between cognitive tasks. Research reviewed in this article probes the control processes that reconfigure mental resources for a change of task by requiring subjects to switch frequently among a small set of simple tasks. Subjects' responses are substantially slower and, usually, more error-prone immediately after a task switch. This 'switch cost' is reduced, but not eliminated, by an opportunity for preparation. It seems to result from both transient and long-term carry-over of 'task-set' activation and inhibition as well as time consumed by task-set reconfiguration processes. Neuroimaging studies of task switching have revealed extra activation in numerous brain regions when subjects prepare to change tasks and when they perform a changed task, but we cannot yet separate 'controlling' from 'controlled' regions.     

Reasoning about data and information

Cognitive states as well as cognitive commodities play central though distinct roles in our epistemological theories. By being attentive to how a difference in their roles affects our way of referring to them, we can undoubtedly accrue our understanding of the structure and functioning of our main epistemological theories. In this paper we propose an analysis of the dichotomy between states and commodities in terms of the method of abstraction, and more specifically by means of infomorphisms between different ways to classify states of information, information-bases, and evidential situations.     

Delay discounting of different commodities II: confirmatory analyses

Delay discounting occurs when individuals are increasingly willing to accept less than the full amount of something to receive it immediately as the delay to the full amount increases. Previous research has reported different "domains" of commodities, with discounting in one domain not being informative about discounting in another. In the present study, 283 participants completed a delay-discounting task with 1 of 2 sets of 5 commodities identical to those used in previous research (Weatherly, Terrell, & Derenne, 2010). Confirmatory factor analyses determined that the observed discounting conformed to previously reported domains. Also replicated was finding that discounting differs both as a function of commodity and how the commodity is framed. These results provide strong support for the idea that temporal decisions made about certain consequences may not necessarily be informative about how an individual will make decisions about other consequences. Also, the framing of the decision can significantly influence observed levels of discounting, potentially clouding interpretation.     

Subjective Estimation of Task Time and Task Difficulty of Simple Movement Tasks

It has been demonstrated in previous work that the same neural structures are used for both imagined and real movements. To provide a strong test of the similarity of imagined and actual movement times, 4 simple movement tasks were used to determine the relationship between estimated task time and actual movement time. The tasks were single-component visually controlled movements, 2-component visually controlled, low index of difficulty (ID) moves and pin-to-hole transfer movements. For each task there was good correspondence between the mean estimated times and actual movement times. In all cases, the same factors determined the actual and estimated movement times: the amplitudes of movement and the IDs of the component movements, however the contribution of each of these variables differed for the imagined and real tasks. Generally, the standard deviations of the estimated times were linearly related to the estimated time values. Overall, the data provide strong evidence for the same neural structures being used for both imagined and actual movements.     

正念训练的去自动化效应：Stroop和前瞻记忆任务证据

研究显示正念训练对心理认知和健康有改善作用, 但少有研究用认知实验进行检验并探讨心理机制, 本研究将正常成人分为正念(训练)和对照组(等待)、使用Stroop任务和前瞻记忆任务, 进行前、后测考察。结果发现, 两种任务正念组后测反应时均低于前测, 且不一致条件下更显著, 对照组无差异。对前瞻记忆前后进行中任务的差值进行前、后测比较发现, 对照组后测显著小于前测, 正念组差异不显著。结果表明, 正念训练促进了Stroop和前瞻记忆任务的完成, 起到了抗自动化干扰、及阻止随任务熟悉加工更为自动化的作用。     

Development of a Career Task Self-Efficacy Scale: The Kuder Task Self-Efficacy Scale

The present study consisted of developing the Kuder Task Self-Efficacy Scale (KTSES). The KTSES is a 30-item scale measuring a person's self-efficacy for tasks corresponding to Kuder's 10 occupational interest areas (Kuder Zytowski, 1991). Responses from the KTSES were compared with responses to the Self-Esteem Inventory (SES; Rosenberg, 1965) and the Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale (CDMSE; Taylor Betz, 1983) to see if career task self-efficacy was related to self-esteem and career decision-making self-efficacy. Answers to the KTSES were also compared with responses given for occupations corresponding to the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS; Kuder Zytowski, 1991) to see if occupational self-efficacy was related to career task self-efficacy. Results supported the validity and reliability of the KTSES. The utility of having a task self-efficacy scale to go with the KOIS is discussed, and ideas for future research are given.     

Managing Sequential Task Portfolios in the Face of Temporal Atypicality and Task Complexity

The authors use a portfolio of sequential tasks to investigate how accurately study participants stick to assigned deadlines when they need to transition from one task to another. Atypical deadlines, task complexity, and individual differences all affect transition error size, error correction, and task performance. In Experiment 1 (N?=?108), larger task transition errors were related negatively to task performance and were associated with atypical deadlines (e.g., 4:53 or 4:57), complex tasks, and individuals lower in the general hurry characteristic. In Experiment 2 (N?=?95), individuals facing atypical deadlines or lower in need for cognition were less likely to correct transition errors (i.e., getting back to the original schedule), which negatively affected performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

努力程度对消费者购买意愿的影响

在日常生活中, 消费者经常面临着各种各样的自我控制问题。当消费者有合适的理由时, 他们会放松自我控制。基于此, 本文经由三个实验探查了消费者努力程度对消费者购买意愿的影响。其中, 实验一和实验二通过操纵被试的相对努力程度, 发现努力会提高人们对于产品的购买意愿, 并且证明负罪感的变化是导致这一影响的内在原因。实验三通过改变产品品类, 证明相对于实用品, 努力对于人们对享乐品的购买意愿的影响更大。     

Task utility and norms for the Preschool Executive Task Assessment (PETA)

Earlier identification of executive deficits in preschool children using an ecological approach would give more scope for intervention. The Preschool Executive Task Assessment (PETA) was developed to resemble an everyday age-appropriate task in order to examine the self-direction and integration of executive functions during a multistep task. It was designed so that performance can be evaluated in a microanalytic way and so individualized feedback and support can be easily communicated. The utility of the PETA was assessed with 166 three-to five-year olds. Results showed improved performance with increasing age and verbal intellectual quotient as well as good task reliability and utility. Evidence for influence of socioeconomic status, gender, and use of self-talk was also observed. Clinical applications and future directions of this novel measure are discussed.