Choosing among alternative parties to be sponsored for supporting brand strategies,based upon emotional responses

• In recent years, much research has been concerned with the effects of sponsorships and the possible advantages a company can gain from engaging in sponsoring activities. Recently focus has been on the role, that sponsoring plays in branding strategy. Here it becomes important to understand exactly what a potential party to be sponsored contributes to the perception of a brand or a company. In this paper, the aim has been reversed to focus on the sponsored party. We propose a number of measurements to determine emotional responses and overall evaluations associated with a sponsored party who is a part of a sponsorship agreement with a company. Four different groups of parties to be sponsored are investigated: social aid organisations, culture, sport and TV‐programmes. Several interesting results emerged from this study; the parties to be sponsored were evaluated very differently on the dimensions used in the study and it is shown that a company can gain very different results depending on the type of object to choose to sponsor. Furthermore, it was shown that the overall evaluation of a party to be sponsored to a large extent is determined by emotions. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

     

Is there a trade-off between cognitive and motor recovery after traumatic brain injury due to competition for limited neural resources?

The status of neurorehabilitation for traumatic brain injury (TBI) is under active debate because of a dearth of research findings demonstrating effectiveness. This may be due, in part, to limitations in our understanding of basic mechanisms of cognitive and motor recovery,including those that might impede recovery. In this regard, we examined whether overall recovery following TBI might be undermined by competition between cognitive and motor functions for finite neural resources during recovery. In this preliminary study, 21 moderately and severely impaired patients were administered cognitive and motor assessments at 1, 4, and 12 months post-TBI, and recovery of cognitive and motor functions was measured using regression residuals. Negative correlations between recovery of cognitive versus motor functions were used as the index of competition. We found suggestive evidence that there may indeed be a trade-off between the recovery of cognitive and motor functions after TBI. Implications for rehabilitation are discussed.     

Changing food preference as a function of mood

The authors investigated the effect of mood on food selection. Participants (N = 98) indicated the likelihood of general eating and the likelihood of eating specific foods after reading and projecting themselves onto the events and emotions described in a sad and a happy vignette. Both men and women believed they were more likely to consume food following a happy versus a sad event, and men believed they were significantly more likely to eat than did women. However, the type of food men and women believed they would consume interacted with the type of event experienced. Vegetarian snack foods were more likely to be consumed following a happy versus a sad event, with men more likely to eat snack foods. Men did not significantly change in likelihood of consuming sweet foods as their mood changed. However, women believed they were more likely to consume sweet foods following a sad event. The authors discuss the results in terms of a self-medication hypothesis and the effect of carbohydrates on central serotonin and endogenous opioids. Overall, results demonstrated that mood influences belief in the likelihood of food selection.     

Estimation and visualization of confusability matrices from adaptive measurement data

We present a simple but effective method based on Luce’s choice axiom [Luce, R.D. (1959). Individual choice behavior: A theoretical analysis. New York: John Wiley & Sons] for consistent estimation of the pairwise confusabilities of items in a multiple-choice recognition task with arbitrarily chosen choice-sets. The method combines the exact (non-asymptotic) Bayesian way of assessing uncertainty with the unbiasedness emphasized in the classical frequentist approach.We apply the method to data collected using an adaptive computer game designed for prevention of reading disability. A player’s estimated confusability of phonemes (or more accurately, phoneme-grapheme connections) and larger units of language is visualized in an easily understood way with color cues and explicit indication of the accuracy of the estimates. Visualization of learning-related changes in the player’s performance is considered.The empirical validity of the choice axiom is evaluated using the game data itself. The axiom appears to hold reasonably well although a small systematic violation is observable for the smallest choice-set sizes.     

A Bayesian-optimal principle for learner-friendly adaptation in learning games

Adaptive learning games should provide opportunities for the student to learn as well as motivate playing until goals have been reached. In this paper, we give a mathematically rigorous treatment of the problem in the framework of Bayesian decision theory. To quantify the opportunities for learning, we assume that the learning tasks that yield the most information about the current skills of the student, while being desirable for measurement in their own right, would also be among those that are efficient for learning. Indeed, optimization of the expected information gain appears to naturally avoid tasks that are exceedingly demanding or exceedingly easy as their results are predictable and thus uninformative. Still, tasks that are efficient for learning may be experienced as too challenging, and the resulting failures can lower motivation. Therefore, in addition to quantifying the expected informational benefit for learning of any prospective task to be presented next, we also model the expected motivational cost of its presentation, measured simply as the estimated probability of failure in our example model. We propose a “learner-friendly” adaptation algorithm that chooses the learning tasks by optimizing the expected benefit divided by the expected cost. We apply this algorithm to a Rasch-like student model implemented within a real-world application and present initial results of a pilot experiment.     

Perceptions of Children Who Lie: Influence of Lie Motive and Benefit

KILMARTIN (1994) suggested that masculine traits may result from externalizing defense style and that when unconscious and unwanted feminine traits about the self occur, they are dealt with in an external way, radier man being directiy resolved by the individual. However, this dieory has received little empirical support. Lobel and Winch (1986) measured defense style among male college students; they found mat men who scored higher in masculinity tended to score higher on acting out (finding an object to attack) and splitting (separating affect from content). Lobel and Winch concluded mat use of diese defense styles reflects avoidance of emotional expression. In turn, diese findings have been supported by research that has suggested mat men use avoidance coping strategies more man women do (McCall &; Struthers, 1994).     

In God and CAM We Trust. Religious Faith and Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in a Nationwide Cohort of Women Treated for Early Breast Cancer

Turning to faith in God or a higher spiritual power is a common way of coping with life-threatening disease such as cancer. Little, however, is known about religious faith among cancer patients in secular societies. The present study aimed at exploring the prevalence of religious faith among Danish breast cancer patients and at identifying whether socio-demographic, pre-cancer health status, clinical, and health behavior characteristics, including their use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), were associated with their degree of faith. Information on faith in God or a higher spiritual power and use of CAM was provided by a nationwide sample of 3,128 recurrence-free Danish women who had received surgery for early-stage breast cancer 15–16 months earlier. Socio-demographic, clinical, and health status variables were obtained from national longitudinal registries, and health behaviors had been assessed at 3–4 months post-surgery. Of the women, 47.3% reported a high degree of faith (unambiguous believers), 35.9% some degree of faith (ambiguous believers), while the remaining 16.8% were non-believers. Unambiguous believers were more likely than ambiguous believers to experience their faith as having a positive impact on their disease and their disease-related quality-of-life. When compared to non-believers, unambiguous believers were also older, had poorer physical function, and were more frequent users of CAM, and more inclined to believe that their use of CAM would have a beneficial influence on their cancer. Disease- and treatment-related variables were unrelated to faith. While overall religious faith appears equally prevalent among Danish and US breast cancer patients, the majority of Danish breast cancer patients experienced ambiguous faith, whereas the majority of US patients have been found to express unambiguous faith. Our results suggest that future studies may benefit from exploring the role of faith for health behaviors, adherence to conventional treatment, and impact upon quality of life.     

Presumed Guilty: Constructing Deviance and Deviants through Techniques of Neutralization

Techniques of neutralization have become one of the most ubiquitous concepts in the study of deviance. This article examines the way in which analysts who use neutralization theory construct the nature of deviance and those who engage in it. The author argues that by invoking the concept of neutralizations, analysts endorse the deviant label being applied to those they study and engage in the practice of “motive mongering.” In many cases, assumptions about the behavior and disposition of those who engage in deviant behavior have been accepted without empirical justification. The implications of this practice for objectivist and subjectivist approaches to defining deviance are examined.     

Givenness, complexity, and the Danish dative alternation

In this study, we investigated the interaction between givenness and complexity on the choice of syntactic structure, via two experiments using speeded acceptability judgments. Experiment 1 showed that for the Danish dative alternation, given–new orders are only easier to process for double-object or NP constructions, whereas PP constructions are unaffected. This replicates previous findings for the English dative alternation. Experiment 2 revealed that when a long NP precedes a short NP—a suboptimal complexity relation—the effect of givenness is neutralized, whereas givenness remains influential when the complexity relation between the NPs in the sentence is optimal. This is consistent with the view that in online parsing, the actual syntactic structure-building process is primary, whereas any higher-order computations such as discourse linking are secondary. The relative complexity of the NPs in the double-object construction directly affects the structure-building process, whereas the decoding of the discourse structure is a later and less crucial phenomenon, resulting in neutralization of the givenness effect in cases in which the complexity relation is suboptimal.