Do you take credit cards? The attitudinal and behavioral effects of advergames targeted at children

Advergames are a promotional tool that confronts children with brands in an entertaining and playful setting. The present study adds to the existing knowledge by analyzing an advergame placement that is usually not targeted at children: credit cards. Based on an emotional conditioning process premised on the positive gaming experience, we argue that advergames lead to an increase in brand evaluation and brand choice. In addition to changes in brand outcomes, we investigate how playing a game promoting credit cards can impact children's spending behavior. For that purpose, children either played the traditional version of Monopoly paying with cash money or they played the banking version, promoting Visa credit cards. Results indicate that exposure to the branded game enhanced preference for Visa. In addition, children's spending behavior increased in an online shopping task. As another important contribution to the literature, we found the behavioral and attitudinal effects to be independent of children's age. In light of young consumers' high debt, our findings raise concerns about targeting children with credit card placements in advergames. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Salvaging the Biological Design Argument in Light of Darwinism?

It is a common assumption that biological organisms appear as though they were designed. Prior to the Darwinian revolution, the order of biological organisms was often taken as a sign of their divine Creator. It is also commonly argued that Darwinian evolutionary theory as a good explanation for the adaptive complexity of biology reveals this appearance to be merely an illusion. However, in recent philosophical discussion several defenses of the compatibility of divine design and Darwinian evolution have emerged. These defenses insist not only that divine design and evolution are compatible, but even that biological organisms can continue to function as pointers to the Creator, even in a Darwinian cosmos. This article explores and extends these recent arguments. I analyze four different strategies for arguing that the wisdom of the Creator is apparent in biological organisms. The basic underlying assumption is that the products of some larger whole can reflect the rationality and designedness of that whole.     

Young Children Choose to Inform Previously Knowledgeable Others

Children recognize that people who know more are better informants than those who know less. How does an individual’s prior knowledge affect children’s decisions about whom to inform? In 3 experiments, 3- to 6-year-old children were invited to share a novel piece of information with 1 of 2 potential recipients who differed in their recent history of knowledge. Children tended to inform the previously knowledgeable person rather than the previously ignorant person. This same effect was observed in a 4th experiment when the knowledgeable person stated that she already knew the information the participant had to share. In no case was the opposite pattern observed: Children never chose to inform the person who had known less. These results seem to conflict with equity considerations and may reflect a preference to affiliate with competent social partners.     

Self-reported expression and experience of triumph across four countries

Recent studies have suggested the existence of the emotion of triumph by documenting how its nonverbal signals are displayed and identified across cultures. The current study contributes to this literature by providing additional convergent evidence about the expression of triumph by examining self-reported expressions of triumph from participants from Japan, Russia, Serbia, and the U.S. Self-reported behavioral expressions of triumph were consistent with three factors previously found to be associated with the triumph expression (Expansion, Aggression, Attention), with the exception of a finding on one scale in one country. The Japanese were prone to report greater regulation compared to the experience of triumph, whereas Americans and Serbians reported relatively greater experience compared to regulation. Across countries, Aggression was positively correlated with self-reported experience. The self-reported expressions of triumph partially corresponded with nonverbal reactions that had been identified as triumph in previous research.     

Self-affirmation and affective forecasting: Affirmation reduces the anticipated impact of negative events

When forecasting how they will feel in the future, people overestimate the impact that imagined negative events will have on their affective states, partly because they underestimate their own psychological resiliency. Because self-affirmation enhances resiliency, two studies examined whether self-affirmation prior to forecasting reduces the extremity of affective forecasts. Participants in self-affirmation conditions completed a values scale or wrote an essay asserting their most important value, whereas participants in the no-affirmation condition asserted a relatively unimportant value. Participants then predicted their affective reactions to a negative or positive imagined event. In both studies, self-affirmation reduced the unpleasant affect expected to result from a negative event, but had no impact on affective forecasts for a positive event. This pattern was mediated by participants’ cognitive appraisals of the imagined event, but not by differential focus on that event. Results are consistent with self-affirmation activating or enhancing psychological resiliency to counteract immune neglect during affective forecasting of a negative event.     

Pictorial Race Activation in Priming Measures

This review explores characteristics of facial primes employed in priming studies of racial prejudice and stereotyping. It addresses the role of perceptual, cue-based processing of visual stimuli characteristics in altering racial typicality, and the effects of different moderators. The authors document the nature of variability in primes and moderators used in priming studies (N = 96) up to 2009. Methodological and conceptual implications are discussed, along with gaps in the field. Better control over facial primes employed, more accuracy in reporting and open access to procedural information are suggested in an effort to improve the state of racial priming research.     

Visual search for emotional expressions: Effect of stimulus set on anger and happiness superiority

Prior reports of preferential detection of emotional expressions in visual search have yielded inconsistent results, even for face stimuli that avoid obvious expression-related perceptual confounds. The current study investigated inconsistent reports of anger and happiness superiority effects using face stimuli drawn from the same database. Experiment 1 excluded procedural differences as a potential factor, replicating a happiness superiority effect in a procedure that previously yielded an anger superiority effect. Experiments 2a and 2b confirmed that image colour or poser gender did not account for prior inconsistent findings. Experiments 3a and 3b identified stimulus set as the critical variable, revealing happiness or anger superiority effects for two partially overlapping sets of face stimuli. The current results highlight the critical role of stimulus selection for the observation of happiness or anger superiority effects in visual search even for face stimuli that avoid obvious expression related perceptual confounds and are drawn from a single database.     

Probabilistic Inferences Under Emotional Stress: How Arousal Affects Decision Processes

Many models of decision making neglect emotional states that could affect individuals' cognitive processes. The present work explores the effect of emotional stress on people's cognitive processes when making probabilistic inferences. Two contrasting hypotheses are tested against one another: the uncertainty‐reduction and attention‐narrowing hypotheses of how emotional stress affects decision making. In the experimental study, emotional stress was induced through the use of highly aversive pictures immediately before each decision. Emotional state was assessed by both subjective (state anxiety, arousal, and pleasantness ratings) and objective (skin conductance) measures. The results show that emotional stress impacts decision making; in particular, emotionally aroused participants seem to have focused on the most important information and selected simpler decision strategies relative to participants in a control condition. The results are in line with the attention‐narrowing hypothesis and suggest that emotional stress can impact decision making through limited predecisional information search and the selection of simpler decision strategies. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The development of and interaction among alerting,orienting, and executive attention in children

A sex-balanced sample (N = 96) of children from age 6.5 to age 12.5 completed a modified Attention Network Test. Across these ages, we found evidence for developmental changes to alerting and executive control but stable orienting. Additionally, we found that the youngest members of our sample manifested an interaction between alerting and executive control that is opposite to that typically found in adults; a reversal that diminishes with age to achieve the adult pattern by the older end of the age range of our sample.