Tell me where you come from and I know what makes you tick: Managing the consumer personality–satisfaction link in diverse cultures

Marketing programs that evoke high satisfaction and marketing success in one culture often fail in others, but the understanding of those cultural differences is insufficient. The question of how culture is linked to consumer satisfaction is still not answered satisfactorily. One promising paradigm for exploring such questions comes from progress in cross-cultural personality psychology. Thus, we examine the influence of individual-level cultural orientations on personality, and the role of personality and affect in satisfaction formation across cultures. Based on experimental data, we show that a high individualism orientation triggers higher levels of extraversion; a high uncertainty-avoidance orientation triggers higher levels of neuroticism. Based on field data from Japan, Spain, and the United States, we identify equivalent relationships amongst personality-related antecedent processes shaping satisfaction indicating universality across these cultures. The findings demonstrate the usefulness of cross-cultural personality psychology theory and methods for understanding and predicting consumer responses to marketing actions across cultures.     

What stops revenge taking? Effects of observed emotional reactions on revenge seeking

What reaction stops revenge taking? Four experiments (total N = 191) examined this question where the victim of an interpersonal transgression could observe the offender's reaction (anger, sadness, pain, or calm) to a retributive noise punishment. We compared the punishment intensity selected by the participant before and after seeing the offender's reaction. Seeing the opponent in pain reduced subsequent punishment most strongly, while displays of sadness and verbal indications of suffering had no appeasing effect. Expression of anger about a retributive punishment did not increase revenge seeking relative to a calm reaction, even when the anger response was disambiguated as being angry with the punisher. It is concluded that the expression of pain is the most effective emotional display for the reduction of retaliatory aggression. The findings are discussed in light of recent research on reactive aggression and retributive justice.     

Maximum likelihood estimation of latent interaction effects with the LMS method

In the context of structural equation modeling, a general interaction model with multiple latent interaction effects is introduced. A stochastic analysis represents the nonnormal distribution of the joint indicator vector as a finite mixture of normal distributions. The Latent Moderated Structural Equations (LMS) approach is a new method developed for the analysis of the general interaction model that utilizes the mixture distribution and provides a ML estimation of model parameters by adapting the EM algorithm. The finite sample properties and the robustness of LMS are discussed. Finally, the applicability of the new method is illustrated by an empirical example. This research has been supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany, No. Mo 474/1 and Mo 474/2. The data for the empirical example have been provided by Andreas Thiele of the University of Frankfurt, Germany. The authors are indebted to an associate editor and to three anonymous reviewers ofPsychometrika whose comments and suggestions have been very helpful.     

Introspective forgetting

We model the forgetting of propositional variables in a modal logical context where agents become ignorant and are aware of each others’ or their own resulting ignorance. The resulting logic is sound and complete. It can be compared to variable-forgetting as abstraction from information, wherein agents become unaware of certain variables: by employing elementary results for bisimulation, it follows that beliefs not involving the forgotten atom(s) remain true. The work for this publication was mainly carried out while Hans van Ditmarsch was associated to: Institut de Recherche en Informatique, Université Paul Sabatier, France.     

Adaptation of career goals to self and opportunities in early adolescence

Development of career goals that are adapted to self and opportunities is a central component of adolescent career preparation. The present longitudinal study (conducted throughout the eighth grade with three assessment points) investigated how 330 Swiss adolescents simultaneously adapt career goals to interests, scholastic achievement and environmental opportunities. Results demonstrated that students increasingly adapt their goals to the environment. Mean adaptation to environment related positively to degree of adaption to interests and achievement. Increased adaptation to environment over time related to increased adaptation to achievement but to decreased adaptation to interests. Gender, attended school type and nationality moderated adaptation processes. Structurally disadvantaged students (girls, lower requirements school track, immigrant students) reported more conflict in aligning adaptation to environment with adaptation to interests.     

Conflict monitoring and the affective-signaling hypothesis—An integrative review

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Conflict-monitoring theory proposes that conflict between incompatible responses is registered by a dedicated monitoring system, and that this conflict signal...     

ALTERNATIVE AXIOMATICS AND COMPLEXITY OF DELIBERATIVE STIT THEORIES

We propose two alternatives to Xu’s axiomatization of Chellas’s STIT. The first one simplifies its presentation, and also provides an alternative axiomatization of the deliberative STIT. The second one starts from the idea that the historic necessity operator can be defined as an abbreviation of operators of agency, and can thus be eliminated from the logic of Chellas’s STIT. The second axiomatization also allows us to establish that the problem of deciding the satisfiability of a STIT formula without temporal operators is NP-complete in the single-agent case, and is NEXPTIME-complete in the multiagent case, both for the deliberative and Chellas’s STIT.