The importance of impulse purchasing behaviour in the international airport environment

Airports are unique retail environments due to the environmental and psychological issues linked with the travel process. Travellers experience feelings of anxiety, stress and excitement which make them react in unusual ways. Airport retail environments therefore differ from more day‐to‐day channels of distribution. Consequently, retailers' approaches must also differ in order to maximise performance. There is evidence of a considerable impulse purchasing effect in airport retail operations which, if understood and harnessed by airport retailers, can enhance performance. The impulse effects will differ significantly between customer segments due to both the psychological effects of the travel experience and the existence of normative traits. Retailers must create an environment that minimises inherent stress and accentuates or at least maintains natural levels of excitement, while also virtuously motivating impulse purchasing by reducing or eliminating barriers to purchase. Development of an impulse strategy, which should permeate all elements of airport retail activities, is essential for maximising performance and profitability. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications Ltd.     

Language can mediate eye movement control within 100 milliseconds, regardless of whether there is anything to move the eyes to

The delay between the signal to move the eyes, and the execution of the corresponding eye movement, is variable, and skewed; with an early peak followed by a considerable tail. This skewed distribution renders the answer to the question “What is the delay between language input and saccade execution?” problematic; for a given task, there is no single number, only a distribution of numbers. Here, two previously published studies are reanalysed, whose designs enable us to answer, instead, the question: How long does it take, as the language unfolds, for the oculomotor system to demonstrate sensitivity to the distinction between “signal” (eye movements due to the unfolding language) and “noise” (eye movements due to extraneous factors)? In two studies, participants heard either ‘the man…’ or ‘the girl…’, and the distribution of launch times towards the concurrently, or previously, depicted man in response to these two inputs was calculated. In both cases, the earliest discrimination between signal and noise occurred at around 100 ms. This rapid interplay between language and oculomotor control is most likely due to cancellation of about-to-be executed saccades towards objects (or their episodic trace) that mismatch the earliest phonological moments of the unfolding word.     

The Ontogenesis of Language Impairment in Autism: A Neuropsychological Perspective

Autistic Disorder (AD) is a phenotypically heterogeneous condition characterized by impairments in social interaction, communication, and the presence of repetitive behavior and restricted interests. It is a model syndrome to investigate neural interaction and integration at the nexus of language and social cognition. This paper considers the problems of language acquisition in AD from an evolutionary and ontogenetic context. Following a review of normal language development during the formative years of brain development, we examine what is known about infant linguistic and nonlinguistic precursors of language acquisition in AD and examine how anomalies of several processes relate to language abnormalities manifest by the early elementary school years. Population heterogeneity and practical limitations inherent to the study of children currently limit a comprehensive understanding of the significance of specific neurological abnormalities in relation to observed deficits. However, convergent evidence implicates anomalies of a widely distributed neural network, involving superior temporal sulcus, superior temporal gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, insula, inferior frontal gyrus, hippocampus, amygdala and cerebellum. These anomalies reflect the cumulative effects of genetic, epigenetic and environmental influences. Neuropsychological studies of language in AD provide an important means to define the phenotypic variation resulting from alterations in neural architecture. By mapping broad relationships between key symptoms, neuropsychological impairment and neural substrate, information derived from these studies enable a level of analysis that bridges the gap between the genome and the syndrome. Further study of children during the critical first 2 years of life using behavioral, electrophysiological, and functional neuroimaging methods is essential.     

Terrorism as a process: a critical review of Moghaddam's "Staircase to Terrorism"

This study reviews empirical evidence for Moghaddam's model "Staircase to Terrorism," which portrays terrorism as a process of six consecutive steps culminating in terrorism. An extensive literature search, where 2,564 publications on terrorism were screened, resulted in 38 articles which were subject to further analysis. The results showed that while most of the theories and processes linked to Moghaddam's model are supported by empirical evidence, the proposed transitions between the different steps are not. These results may question the validity of a linear stepwise model and may suggest that a combination of mechanisms/factors could combine in different ways to produce terrorism.     

Acquired epileptiform aphasia: a dimensional view of Landau-Kleffner syndrome and the relation to regressive autistic spectrum disorders.

Acquired epileptiform aphasia (AEA) is characterized by deterioration in language in childhood associated with seizures or epileptiform electroencephalographic abnormalities. Despite an extensive literature, discrepancies and contradictions surround its definition and nosological boundaries. This paper reviews current conceptions of AEA and highlights variations in the aphasic disturbance, age of onset, epileptiform EEG abnormalities, temporal course, and long-term outcome. We suggest that AEA, rather than being a discrete entity, is comprised of multiple variants that have in common the features of language regression and epileptiform changes on EEG. Viewed this way, we argue that AEA can be conceptualized on a spectrum with other epileptiform neurocognitive disorders that may share pathophysiological features. The implications of this viewpoint are discussed, with emphasis on parallels between the AEA variants and regressive autistic spectrum disorders.     

Psychological Distress Reported by Patients Undergoing Limb Reconstruction Surgery: Implications for Psychological Interventions

Limb reconstruction is an orthopaedic surgical technique designed to restore or improve functioning and appearance. The aims of the present study were to investigate levels of psychological distress in adults undergoing limb reconstruction as a result of traumatic injury, to examine which variables could account for any variations in distress during and after treatment, and to ascertain the potential relevance of psychological interventions. A cross-sectional sample of patients completed measures of psychological distress, posttraumatic symptomatology, coping, social support, pain, and disability. Self-reported levels of psychological distress and posttraumatic symptoms were high but did not tend to vary across stage of treatment, suggesting that distress is not solely attributable to limb reconstruction treatment per se but to other factors. Both medical variables (pain and mobility) and psychological variables (symptoms of trauma and coping strategies) accounted for a significant percentage of the variance in HAD scores. These results suggest that both medical and psychological interventions have potential for reducing distress and increasing well-being in an orthopaedic population who are experiencing high levels of emotional distress.     

Social outcomes in childhood brain disorder: a heuristic integration of social neuroscience and developmental psychology

The authors propose a heuristic model of the social outcomes of childhood brain disorder that draws on models and methods from both the emerging field of social cognitive neuroscience and the study of social competence in developmental psychology/psychopathology. The heuristic model characterizes the relationships between social adjustment, peer interactions and relationships, social problem solving and communication, social-affective and cognitive-executive processes, and their neural substrates. The model is illustrated by research on a specific form of childhood brain disorder, traumatic brain injury. The heuristic model may promote research regarding the neural and cognitive-affective substrates of children's social development. It also may engender more precise methods of measuring impairments and disabilities in children with brain disorder and suggest ways to promote their social adaptation.     

Incrementality and Prediction in Human Sentence Processing

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real-world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real-world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal states of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality.     

The biological bases of unfairness: Neuroimaging evidence for the distinctiveness of procedural and distributive justice

A classic debate in the organizational justice literature concerns the question of whether procedural justice and distributive justice are independent constructs. We investigate this question by using fMRI methods to examine brain activation patterns associated with procedural and distributive unfairness. We observed a clear dissociation of activation between these two forms of justice, and only a minimal amount of shared activation in the hypothesized regions. Specifically, unfair procedures evoked greater activation in parts of the brain related to social cognition, such as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS), whereas unfair outcomes evoked greater activation in more emotional areas of the brain, such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior insula (AI) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). We interpret the findings as supporting the notion that the two forms of justice reflect distinct constructs, while recognizing that, as forms of justice, they are closely related nomologically.