Consumer neuroscience for marketing researchers

Purpose

For many consumer neuromarketing researchers, the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging has been the most preferred neuroscience technique. However, electroencephalography, eye tracking, and implicit measurements are becoming increasingly popular market research methods due to rapid technological improvements and reduced costs.

Design

This article is an overview of the most commonly used consumer neuroscience techniques in marketing research.

Findings

Many peer‐reviewed journal articles in the consumer neuroscience literature usually provide only a brief summary of the actual functions of each neuroscience technique used in their research. Throughout the consumer neuroscience and marketing research literature, there is a lack of comprehensive evaluation of the relative merits of all neuroscience research tools. There is no rigorous analysis of the relative appropriateness of all the neuroscience, physiological, and biometric research tools currently used in consumer neuroscience market research.

Originality/value

This is the first paper that provides a comprehensive review of all relevant neuroscience techniques with a proper explanation of their functions and utility for different types of research. Each individual neuromarketing research tools' strengths and weaknesses are analysed for particular types of marketing research questions and highlights some of the key research papers and authors for interested researchers to follow up.     

The Effect of Message Persistence and Disclosure on Liking in Computer-Mediated Communication

In computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems, the messages that a user types usually persist on the screen for some time, a feature that distinguishes CMC from face-to-face interaction. Persistence may activate psychological self-perception, leading communicators to infer from their persistent messaging how they feel about the subject more so than if messages did not persist. This study applies persistence and self-perception to the relationships between self-disclosure and liking. It identifies which among several disclosure or liking relationships may be most susceptible to self-perception effects. An experiment found that message persistence interacts with a conversational partner’s responses to self-disclosure and intensifies liking toward the partner. Suggestions follow for future research further exploring the mechanisms of persistence, and reconceptualizing self-perception factors in interactive media settings.     

Biases in multilevel analyses caused by cluster-specific fixed-effects imputation

When datasets are affected by nonresponse, imputation of the missing values is a viable solution. However, most imputation routines implemented in commonly used statistical software packages do not accommodate multilevel models that are popular in education research and other settings involving clustering of units. A common strategy to take the hierarchical structure of the data into account is to include cluster-specific fixed effects in the imputation model. Still, this ad hoc approach has never been compared analytically to the congenial multilevel imputation in a random slopes setting. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the cluster-specific fixed-effects imputation model on multilevel inference. We show analytically that the cluster-specific fixed-effects imputation strategy will generally bias inferences obtained from random coefficient models. The bias of random-effects variances and global fixed-effects confidence intervals depends on the cluster size, the relation of within- and between-cluster variance, and the missing data mechanism. We illustrate the negative implications of cluster-specific fixed-effects imputation using simulation studies and an application based on data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) in Germany.     

A relational recasting of the principles of emotional competence

ABSTRACT

Carolyn Saarni’s theory of emotional competence has made a central contribution by directing attention to some important functions of emotion in social interaction. Her work is permeated with examples of how emotions function within both successful and unsuccessful social interactions and relationships. An examination of her stated principles of emotional competence suggest in places a perspective that is primarily intrapsychic in nature, harking back to the early roots of emotion theory and research. In this piece, we note where Saarni has advanced implications of a relational theory of emotion for understanding emotional competence. In addition, we reframe some of Saarni’s principles to make them more consistent with current relational approaches to emotion. Finally, we offer additions and extensions that we believe are compatible with the general direction of her thinking before her untimely death.     

Charles “Erik” Eriksen (1923-2018)

A towering figure in experimental psychology, Charles W. Eriksen, passed away in February this year. “Erik” made extensive original and lasting contributions to both research methods and theories in several areas of psychology, especially involving visual information processing. His research exhibited consistent concerns with experimental methods for distinguishing among alternative explanations and distinguishing perception from behavior. Erik pioneered many research methods now in common use—including converging operations, visual search, rapid serial presentations, the stop-signal paradigm, temporal integration in form perception, spatial cues for guiding selective attention, and the flankers task. He also introduced and tested many theories of selective attention. Erik was the founding editor of Perception & Psychophysics, and served for 23 years as its principal editor. An impressive and unforgettable person, Erik was a compelling personification of “the greatest generation.”     

Is psychological science a-cultural?

The history of psychological science, as it has intersected with ethnoracial, cultural, and other marginalized domains of group difference, is replete with disinterest, dismissal, or denigration of these diverse forms of psychological experience. This has led some to wonder whether psychological science is a-cultural, or even anti-cultural in orientation. Assessment of this provocative proposition first requires exploration of three composite questions: (1) What is culture?, (2) What is science?, and (3) What is psychological science? Based on brief consideration of these composite questions--which are remarkably complex in their own right--I argue that psychological science is not, has never been, and indeed cannot in principle be a-cultural. Instead, like all forms of knowing, psychological science emerges at particular historical moments to achieve particular goals that are motivated by particular interests. Throughout much of the history of psychological science, these goals and interests were tied to ideologically suspect agendas that contemporary psychologists are right to repudiate. The interesting question becomes whether psychology's knowledge practices can be disentangled from this earlier ideological contamination to furnish the discipline with viable methods. I propose that psychological science can in fact be so disentangled; nevertheless, the resulting methods are never adopted or deployed outside of culturally constituted interests, objectives, and motivations, thereby requiring ongoing critical engagement with the subtexts of disciplinary knowledge production. In fact, there seem to be important ways in which psychology's scientific aspirations hobble disciplinary inquiry into the human condition that has motivated multicultural psychologists to consider alternative paradigms of inquiry.     

Multisensory information boosts numerical matching abilities in young children

This study presents the first evidence that preschool children perform more accurately in a numerical matching task when given multisensory rather than unisensory information about number. Three- to 5-year-old children learned to play a numerical matching game on a touchscreen computer, which asked them to match a sample numerosity with a numerically equivalent choice numerosity. Samples consisted of a series of visual squares on some trials, a series of auditory tones on other trials, and synchronized squares and tones on still other trials. Children performed at chance on this matching task when provided with either type of unisensory sample, but improved significantly when provided with multisensory samples. There was no speed–accuracy tradeoff between unisensory and multisensory trial types. Thus, these findings suggest that intersensory redundancy may improve young children’s abilities to match numerosities.     

Progressive and regressive developmental changes in neural substrates for face processing: testing specific predictions of the Interactive Specialization account

Face processing undergoes a fairly protracted developmental time course but the neural underpinnings are not well understood. Prior fMRI studies have only examined progressive changes (i.e., increases in specialization in certain regions with age), which would be predicted by both the Interactive Specialization (IS) and maturational theories of neural development. To differentiate between these accounts, the present study also examined regressive changes (i.e., decreases in specialization in certain regions with age), which is predicted by the IS but not maturational account. The fMRI results show that both progressive and regressive changes occur, consistent with IS. Progressive changes mostly occurred in occipital-fusiform and inferior frontal cortex whereas regressive changes largely emerged in parietal and lateral temporal cortices. Moreover, inconsistent with the maturational account, all of the regions involved in face viewing in adults were active in children, with some regions already specialized for face processing by 5 years of age and other regions activated in children but not specifically for faces. Thus, neurodevelopment of face processing involves dynamic interactions among brain regions including age-related increases and decreases in specialization and the involvement of different regions at different ages. These results are more consistent with IS than maturational models of neural development.     

Generation,interiority and the phenomenology of Christianity in Michel Henry

In this paper I focus on a central phenomenological concept in Michel Henry’s work that has often been neglected: generation. Generation becomes an especially important conceptual key to understanding not only the relationship between God and human self but also Henry’s adoption of radical interiority and his critical standpoint with respect to much of the phenomenological tradition in which he is working. Thus in pursuing the theme of generation, I shall introduce many phenomenological-theological terms in Henry’s trilogy on Christianity as well as how he understands the relationship between phenomenology and theology. In the final sections of the paper, I turn to positively defining Henry’s notion of divine generation and examine the theological implications of it in light of his confrontation and rejection of the doctrine of creation in the book of Genesis found in his book, Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair. Humans are not created but are eternally generated, a bold claim that brings Henry to the brink of a kind of interiorized pantheism or Gnostic dualism. Finally, I offer some critical comments specifically about Henry’s doctrine of generation in light of the tension between auto-affection and hetero-affection and thus how one might think “after Henry” in light of the basic Augustinian theological distinction between self and God and the intentionality of faith opened up by that distinction.