To do or to have? Exploring the effects of social exclusion on experiential and material purchases

Social exclusion is widespread in our modern society. In the context of marketing, consumers who are excluded will choose specific products to mitigate the negative consequences of exclusion. This research examined the effect of social exclusion on consumer preferences. Three experimental studies were conducted to test whether consumers experiencing social exclusion would choose specific kinds of purchases. The results of the three studies provided convergent support for the notion that consumers who feel socially excluded exhibit a preference for experiential purchases over material purchases. It therefore appears that experiential purchases can more effectively compensate for the relational needs caused by social exclusion. The effect was stronger for socially excluded individuals exhibiting more interdependent self‐construal than for those exhibiting a more independent self‐construal. These results indicate that social impact is an antecedent of experiential purchases, and they shed light on an important mechanism to alleviate the negative effects of social exclusion.     

建设性还是破坏性?羞愧的双路径模型

羞愧是一种典型的自我意识情绪, 在个体行为以及心理发展结果中发挥着重要作用。羞愧同时是一种中国传统文化中极为重要的道德情绪, 被认为是中国人自我反省的重要途径。但当前关于羞愧的导向性存在两个截然相反的观点:羞愧导向建设性还是破坏性?理论模型包括:其一, 羞愧导向破坏性, 相应的理论解释有社会威胁防御模型、羞愧调节模型等, 其二, 羞愧导向建设性, 相应的理论解释有进化心理学视角及功能主义视角等。这两种观点均得到大量实证研究的支持。为了合理解释这一分歧, 系统理解羞愧促发的行动机制, 本文提出羞愧的双路径结构模型, 突出社会自我威胁评估在其中的重要作用。未来研究需要开发出更客观全面的羞愧测量方法, 基于文化差异关注社会自我修复的影响因素, 理解不同文化背景社会对羞愧的诠释, 从而提出更具针对性的干预方法, 以促进个体羞愧可能的破坏性结果向建设性方向转化。     

睾酮与人类攻击行为

睾酮是一种可以在男性的睾丸间质细胞、女性卵巢和胎盘的皮层细胞中合成并分泌的雄性激素, 它可以调节个体的各种生理、形态和行为过程, 对个体生存和繁殖至关重要。大量研究表明, 睾酮与社会行为的关联存在双向性, 睾酮可以调节社会行为, 社会行为可以反馈并进一步影响睾酮水平。我们将关注点聚焦于睾酮与人类攻击行为之间的关联。早期研究发现, 高睾酮水平个体表现出更高的攻击性; 近期的研究根据挑战假设理论模型和生物社会地位模型得出, 人体内的睾酮水平对竞争性相互作用具有高度反应性。此外, 通过对大量研究的回顾与分析, 我们总结出睾酮水平的变化可以通过增强杏仁核的反应性或减少前额叶皮质-杏仁核功能耦合来影响攻击行为。未来的研究者应考虑其他激素(如皮质醇)和人格特征调节睾酮和人类攻击行为之间关系的潜在作用, 以及相关的生物学机制。     

自我损耗降低决策理性:心理机制与边界条件

处于自我损耗状态时, 个体在意愿上偏好即时利益和目标, 并且会做出许多非理性决策行为。在梳理自我损耗对行为决策的影响基础上, 指出自我损耗降低决策理性的注意机制和执行机制:一方面, 损耗使个体注意力更容易为即时利益所捕获, 进而重视短期利益而忽视长远利益, 即降低个体关注未来的能力; 另一方面, 损耗导致个体缺少计划性和行为实施的执行力, 即降低个体坚守未来的能力。此外, 损耗对决策理性的影响存在个体和情境两个方面的重要边界。未来可结合眼动技术验证损耗降低决策理性的注意机制, 进一步探究潜在边界条件以及寻找助推理性决策的方法。     

Managing job seekers' organizational image beliefs: the role of media richness and media credibility

In this article, the authors assessed job seekers' organizational image beliefs before and after they experienced 3 recruitment media. The authors examined whether perceptions of media richness and credibility were related to improvements in the correspondence between job seekers' image beliefs and firms' projected images. Both media richness and credibility perceptions were associated with correspondence between job seekers' image beliefs and firms' projected images. However, results revealed that richness and credibility perceptions were likely to enhance job seekers' initial beliefs about firms' images when their beliefs were positive but did not diminish job seekers' beliefs about firms' images when their initial impressions were too positive.     

The pursuit of self-esteem: contingencies of self-worth and self-regulation

Successful self-regulation is defined as the willingness to exert effort toward one's most important goals, while taking setbacks and failures as opportunities to learn, identify weaknesses and address them, and develop new strategies toward achieving those goals. Contingencies of self-worth can facilitate self-regulation because people are highly motivated to succeed and avoid failure in domains of contingency. However, because boosts in self-esteem are pleasurable and drops in self-esteem are painful, protection, maintenance, and enhancement of self-esteem can become the overriding goal. Several pitfalls for self-regulation can result, especially when tasks are difficult and failure is likely. In this article, we describe a program of research examining these self-regulation pitfalls associated with contingent self-worth and suggest that learning orientations, particularly the willingness to embrace failure for the learning it affords, foster successful self-regulation even in people with highly contingent self-esteem.     

Field dependence-independence and participation in physical activity by college students

Field-independent individuals, compared with field-dependent individuals, have higher sports potential and advantages in sport-related settings. Little research, however, has been conducted on the association of field dependence-independence and participation in physical activity. The study examined this association for college students who participated in physical activities in and beyond physical education classes. The Group Embedded Figures Test distinguished 40 field-dependent from 40 field-independent participants. Activity logs during one semester showed that field-independent participants were significantly more physically active and their physical activity behaviors were more sport-related than those of field-dependent participants.     

Young children can extend motion verbs to point-light displays

In the first study using point-light displays (lights corresponding to the joints of the human body) to examine children's understanding of verbs, 3-year-olds were tested to see if they could perceive familiar actions that corresponded to motion verbs (e.g., walking). Experiment 1 showed that children could extend familiar motion verbs (e.g., walking and dancing) to videotaped point-light actions shown in the intermodal preferential looking paradigm. Children watched the action that matched the requested verb significantly more than they watched the action that did not match the verb. In Experiment 2, the findings of Experiment 1 were validated by having children spontaneously produce verbs for these actions. The use of point-light displays may illuminate the factors that contribute to verb learning.     

The influence of task requirements on priming in object decision and matching

We argue that task requirements can be the determinant in generating different results in studies on visual object recognition. We investigated priming for novel visual objects in three implicit memory tasks. A study-test design was employed in which participants first viewed line drawings of unfamiliar objects and later made different decisions about structural aspects of the objects. Priming for both symmetric and asymmetric possible objects was observed in a task requiring a judgment of structural possibility. However, when the task was changed to one requiring a judgment of structural symmetry, only symmetric possible objects showed priming. Finally, in a matching task in which participants made a same-different judgment, only symmetric possible objects exhibited priming. These results suggest that an understanding of object representation will be most fruitful if it is based on careful analyses of both the task demands and their interaction(s) with encoding and retrieval processes.