“Not me” consumer justifications for not reporting suspected price-fixing activities: Neutralization techniques & counterstrategies

Price-fixing, an anti-competitive activity by firms, raises consumer prices, limits consumer choices, and violates the law. Drawing on the neutralization theory, this study aims to investigate consumer participation in anti-price-fixing efforts. This is important as the government's strategy of combating price-fixing often relies on tip-offs from the public. Accordingly, this study examines consumer willingness to come forward to file a complaint of suspected price-fixing cases to authorities and the justifications provided by participants for their reluctance. Focus group interviews were conducted with twenty-three participants. The findings revealed that although the participants agreed that price-fixing is unethical and unjust, they were reluctant to file a complaint to report suspected price-fixing activities to authorities. This study makes theoretical contributions to uncover five neutralization techniques used by the participants to reconcile their negative feelings. Three new counterstrategies have not been explored or discussed in previous studies. This contributes to a new line of inquiry about consumer responses to price-fixing.     

Adaptation and implementation of the German social–emotional learning programme Papilio in Finland: A pilot study

This study investigated the cross-national adaptation and implementation of Papilio, a German social–emotional learning programme, in Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres. Papilio is a developmentally focused, scientifically based intervention programme focused on preventing behavioural problems and fostering social–emotional competence in children aged 3–7. The aim of this study was to investigate and evaluate the cross-national adaptation and cross-cultural adaptation and implementation of Papilio in the Finnish ECEC context. Results from qualitative interviews with one Finnish Papilio trainer, 11 early childhood education (ECE) teachers, two ECE special education teachers and two nursery nurses are supplemented with teachers' and nursery nurses' (N = 75) questionnaire data. Qualitative thematic analysis revealed that cultural adaptations were necessary on four levels: accommodation of materials, adaptation of the contents of the materials, structure and delivery. The materials and training contents were culturally adapted, whereas the delivery of the intervention was adapted according to Finnish ECEC practices. The structural adaptation included discarding timeout, due to opposition by some educators. The educators were committed to implementing the programme as instructed and resolving the practical difficulties they encountered. Their motivation to implement Papilio increased as they observed improvements in the children's social–emotional competence during intervention.     

Adapting to changing memory retrieval demands: Evidence from event-related potentials

This study investigated preparatory processes involved in adapting to changing episodic memory retrieval demands. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a general old/new recognition task and a specific task that also required retrieval of perceptual details. The relevant task remained either constant or changed (predictably or randomly) across trials. Responses were slowed when participants switched from the specific to the general task but not vice versa. Hence, asymmetrical switch costs were observed, suggesting that retrieval preparation is dependent not only on the current retrieval goal but also influenced by recent retrieval attempts. Consistently, over posterior scalp regions ERPs associated with advance preparation were modulated by the preceding task, reflecting increased attentional selection requirements for the general task, and by the foreknowledge about the task sequence. When retrieval demands remained constant, frontal slow-waves elicited by retrieval-cues were more positive going for the specific task, indicating full implementation of a retrieval orientation that allows more efficient retrieval of perceptual details.     

Region segmentation and contextual cuing

Contextual information provides an important source for behavioral orienting. For instance, in the contextualcuing paradigm, repetitions of the spatial layout of elements in a search display can guide attention to the target location. The present study explored how this contextual-cuing effect is influenced by the grouping of search elements. In Experiment 1, four nontarget items could be arranged collinearly to form an imaginary square. The presence of such a square eliminated the contextual-cuing effect, despite the fact that the square’s location still had a predictive value for the target location. Three follow-up experiments demonstrated that other types of grouping abolished contextual cuing in a similar way and that the mere presence of a task-irrelevant singleton had only a diminishing effect (by half ) on contextual cuing. These findings suggest that a segmented, salient region can interfere with contextual cuing, reducing its predictive impact on search.     

The role of sleep-related beliefs to improvement in early cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia

The aim of this investigation was to examine whether sleep-related beliefs, and reductions in such beliefs and attitudes, were related to clinical improvements in sleep and daytime symptoms after cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). In total, 64 patients with a short history of insomnia (3-12 months) who had participated in a randomized controlled trial with a 1-year follow-up and received CBT were included. With stepwise multiple regression analyses, sleep-related beliefs were linked to clinical improvements in sleep (five outcomes) and daytime symptoms (seven outcomes). Results indicated that sleep-related beliefs played a small predictive role in clinical improvements in sleep and daytime symptoms after CBT group treatment. Sleep-related beliefs were predictive of treatment response only with regard to sleep efficiency and sleepiness. Reductions in sleep-related beliefs were, however, differently related to improvements in sleep and daytime symptoms. Reductions in such beliefs were consistently linked to improvements in daytime symptoms (7-14% of the variance) but not to sleep improvements (except for sleep quality). In all, this might suggest that sleep-related beliefs play a slightly different role in insomnia than previously envisioned.     

Changing viewpoints during dynamic events

The connection of various viewpoints of a visual dynamic scene can be realised in different ways. We examined if various presentation modes influence scene recognition and cognitive representation type. In the learning phase, participants saw clips of basketball scenes from (a) a single, unvaried viewpoint, or with a change of viewpoint during the scene, whereby the connection was realised (b) by an abrupt cut, or (c) by a continuous camera move. In the test phase, participants had to recognise video stills presenting basketball scenes from the same or differing viewpoints. As expected, cuts led to lower recognition accuracy than a fixed unvaried viewpoint, whereas this was not the case for moves. However, the kind of connection between two viewpoints had no influence on the viewpoint dependence of the cognitive representation. Additionally, it was found that the amount of viewpoint deviation seemed to influence the overall conservativeness of participants' reactions.     

Sublexical frequency measures for orthographic and phonological units in German

Many recent studies have demonstrated the influence of sublexical frequency measures on language processing, or called for controlling sublexical measures when selecting stimulus material for psycholinguistic studies (Aichert & Ziegler, 2005). The present study discusses which measures should be controlled for in what kind of study, and presents orthographic and phonological syllable, dual unit (bigram and biphoneme) and single unit (letter and phoneme) type and token frequency measures derived from the lemma and word form corpora of the CELEX lexical database (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995). Additionally, we present the SUBLEX software as an adaptive tool for calculating sublexical frequency measures and discuss possible future applications. The measures and the software can be downloaded at www.psychonomic.org.