The Influence of Social Regard on the Customer–Service Firm Relationship: The Moderating Role of Length of Relationship

Purpose  

The authors examine the influence of employees’ social regard toward the customers on customer satisfaction, trust, and word of mouth. In addition, we analyzed the moderating role of length of relationship between the service provider and the customer on the effects of social regard on the customer relationship outcomes.     

Criteria‐based content analysis of true and suggested accounts of events

Worldwide, the criteria‐based content analysis (CBCA) is probably the most widely used veracity assessment technique for discriminating between accounts of true and fabricated events. In this study, two experiments examined the effectiveness of the CBCA for discriminating between accounts of true events and suggested events believed to be true. In Experiment 1, CBCA‐trained judges evaluated participants' accounts of true and suggestively planted childhood events. In Experiment 2, judges analysed accounts of recent events that were experimentally manipulated to be a (a) true experience, (b) false experience believed to be true and (c) deliberately fabricated experience. In both experiments CBCA scores were significantly higher for accounts of true events than suggested events. However, this difference was not significant for participants classified as experiencing ‘full’ memories for the suggested event. Self‐report memory measures supported the findings of the CBCA analyses. Taken together these results suggest that the CBCA discriminative power is greatly constrained. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What I Was Doing Versus What I Did: Verb Aspect Influences Memory and Future Actions

ABSTRACT— This research examined whether describing past actions as ongoing using the imperfective aspect (rather than describing them as completed using the perfective aspect) promotes memory for action-relevant knowledge and reenactment of these actions in a future context. In Experiment 1 , participants who used the imperfective aspect to describe their strategy on a prior interpersonal task were more likely to use this strategy on a later task than were participants who used the perfective aspect to describe their prior strategy. Experiment 2 demonstrated that describing behaviors on a task using the imperfective rather than the perfective aspect increased willingness to resume that task by improving memory for task contents. The last two experiments showed that the effects of the imperfective aspect on memory decayed over time and that the imperfective aspect facilitated performance of a future behavior only when the described past behavior was relevant to the future behavior. Thus, the effects of aspect are moderated by memory decay and are behavior-specific.     

Direct and indirect effects of parents' education on reading achievement among third graders in Sweden

Background Cultural capital in families and especially, the educational level of parents, has during the last decades been found to be the most important dimension of socio‐economic influence on school performance. How the transmission of cultural capital over generations is concretized is however not yet fully investigated. Aims The aim is to unfold the influence of home background and more specifically, to reveal some important mediating factors between the educational levels of parents and the reading achievement levels of children. Sample Data comes from the Swedish participation in Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2001 conducted by the The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement and comprises some 10,000 students in grade 3. Methods The effects of parents' education on reading achievement are estimated with structural equation modelling. Results The results reveal that the total effect of parents' education is substantial and that almost half of this effect is mediated through other variables, i.e. the number of books at home, early literacy activities, and emergent literacy abilities at the time for school start. The article thus identifies some of the mechanisms through which parents' education exert an influence on children's literacy development. Conclusions Cultural reproduction starts in the very early childhood, in informal settings where reading aloud is an important activity. The knowledge of written language that children have at the time for school‐start influences further reading acquisition.     

Artificial explanations: the epistemological interpretation of explanation in AI

In this paper I critically examine the notion of explanation used in artificial intelligence in general, and in the theory of belief revision in particular. I focus on two of the best known accounts in the literature: Pagnucco’s abductive expansion functions and Gärdenfors’ counterfactual analysis. I argue that both accounts are at odds with the way in which this notion has historically been understood in philosophy. They are also at odds with the explanatory strategies used in actual scientific practice. At the end of the paper I outline a set of desiderata for an epistemologically motivated, scientifically informed belief revision model for explanation.     

When head is tempered by heart: Heart rate variability modulates perception of other-blame reducing anger

This study examined the relationship between heart rate variability (HRV), as an index of individual differences in emotion regulation, and perception of other-blame, as a mechanism of anger induction. The physiological responses were recorded while subjects read a story from a computer screen. The story narrated a negative event in self-referred way -dismissal from a job as the result of a colleague’s action- under conditions of intentionality versus non-intentionality. Cognitive and emotional variables were assessed by questionnaire immediately after the physiological test. The resulting structural model supports the conclusion that HRV exerts its regulatory influence directly on perception of other-blame rather than on emotion. In situations of intentionality, individuals with higher HRV make less extreme evaluation of the offender’s blame, versus those with lower HRV, thus leading to a reduction in anger reaction. These results suggest that HRV is a direct index of cognitive rather than emotional regulation.     

Hysterectomy as Viewed by Mexican Women and Men

This study explored the views of Mexican men and women concerning hysterectomy. We studied 120 women and 135 men between the ages of 36 and 55. Women had not had a hysterectomy and men were married to a woman without a hysterectomy. The most negative views about hysterectomy were women’s suppositions about male perceptions, but only among people with a limited educational background. This group was more likely to believe that women who undergo hysterectomy are incomplete, rejected by their partners, and experience emotional changes. These findings are discussed in light of sociocultural features.     

Cognitive models of choice: comparing decision field theory to the proportional difference model

People often face preferential decisions under risk. To further our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying these preferential choices, two prominent cognitive models, decision field theory (DFT; Busemeyer & Townsend, 1993 ) and the proportional difference model (PD; González-Vallejo, 2002 ), were rigorously tested against each other. In two consecutive experiments, the participants repeatedly had to choose between monetary gambles. The first experiment provided the reference to estimate the models' free parameters. From these estimations, new gamble pairs were generated for the second experiment such that the two models made maximally divergent predictions. In the first experiment, both models explained the data equally well. However, in the second generalization experiment, the participants' choices were much closer to the predictions of DFT. The results indicate that the stochastic process assumed by DFT, in which evidence in favor of or against each option accumulates over time, described people's choice behavior better than the trade-offs between proportional differences assumed by PD.     

Role of the Disease in the Psychological Impact of Pre-Symptomatic Testing for SCA2 and FAP ATTRV30M: Experience with the Disease, Kinship and Gender of the Transmitting Parent

To identify possible factors affecting the psychological impact of pre-symptomatic testing for spinocerebellar ataxia type 2 (SCA2) and familial amyloid polyneuropathy (FAP ATTRV30M), we studied (1) the effect of previous experience with the disease in the family, (2) kinship with the closest affected relative and (3) gender of affected parent, when adapting to test results; as well as (4) differences in the course of psychological wellbeing in 63 subjects ( 28 at-risk for FAP ATTRV30M, and 35 at risk for SCA2), who pursued predictive testing for these diseases, in Cuba and in Portugal. Our research shows that individuals with little or no experience with the disease in their family exhibited more anxiety; at-risk subjects for SCA2 or FAP ATTRV30M who had a first degree relative with the disease showed lower levels of anxiety and depression during pre-symptomatic testing. Also those with an affected mother had lower levels of depression, either immediately, or one year after receipt of test results. Adaptation to pre-symptomatic testing results differed for subjects at-risk for the two different conditions. Unlike the FAP ATTRV30M families, carriers for SCA2 reported pathological levels of depression immediately after-testing (3 weeks), although those levels had returned to normal levels at 6 months. Subjects at-risk for FAP ATTRV30M tended to have less anxiety than those tested for SCA2, at the one-year follow-up. Overall, depression levels improved over time, while anxiety remained more constant. A longer awareness of the disease in the family, closer kinship, and a transmitting mother all lessened the impact of pre-symptomatic testing, as expressed by the post-test levels of anxiety and depression.     

Early morphological processing is morphosemantic and not simply morpho-orthographic: A violation of form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition

Many studies have suggested that a word’s orthographic form must be processed before its meaning becomes available. Some interpret the (null) finding of equal facilitation after semantically transparent and opaque morphologically related primes in early stages of morphological processing as consistent with this view. Recent literature suggests that morphological facilitation tends to be greater after transparent than after opaque primes, however. To determine whether the degree of semantic transparency influences parsing into a stem and a suffix (morphological decomposition) in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared patterns of facilitation between semantically transparent (e.g., coolant—cool) and opaque (e.g., rampant—ramp) prime—target pairs. Form properties of the stem (frequency, neighborhood size, and prime—target letter overlap), as well as related—unrelated and transparent—opaque affixes, were matched. Morphological facilitation was significantly greater for semantically transparent pairs than for opaque pairs. Ratings of prime—target relatedness predicted the magnitude of facilitation. The results limit the scope of form-then-meaning models of word recognition and demonstrate that semantic similarity can influence even early stages of morphological processing. The research reported here was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Development Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories.