Segmenting initial fans of a new team: A taxonomy of sport early adopters

Marketers are interested in the first buyers of new products, given their important role in driving wider community adoption. This is especially the case for new entertainment products, like new or relocated sports teams who must quickly build fan connections and loyalty, given the importance of crowds and social networks in adding value to the entertainment experience. Fans choose to connect with sports teams for numerous reasons; however, fan development in the context of a new team has rarely been examined. This paper examines the diversity and similarity among inaugural fans of an expansion team. A large sample (n = 1724) was classified into five segments revealing how each varies in their brand associations, satisfaction, identification and involvement. By analysing key dimensions (relationship identifiers) that characterise how consumers connect with a new team, the authors provide new insights about the nature of consumers in the context of a new sports team. Furthermore, the five segments were found to be distinct cohorts, with sufficient variation between them to warrant variant marketing approaches to achieve the outcome of committed, long‐term fans. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Preferential processing of threatening facial expressions using the repetition blindness paradigm

Background: Neuroanatomical evidence suggests that the human brain has dedicated pathways to rapidly process threatening stimuli. This processing bias for threat was examined using the repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. RB (i.e., failure to report the second instance of an identical stimulus rapidly following the first) has been established for words, objects and faces but not, to date, facial expressions. Methods: 78 (Study 1) and 62 (Study 2) participants identified repeated and different, threatening and non-threatening emotional facial expressions in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams. Results: In Study 1, repeated facial expressions produced more RB than different expressions. RB was attenuated for threatening expressions. In Study 2, attenuation of RB for threatening expressions was replicated. Additionally, semantically related but non-identical threatening expressions reduced RB relative to non-threatening stimuli. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the threat bias is apparent in the temporal processing of facial expressions, and expands the RB paradigm by demonstrating that identical facial expressions are susceptible to the effect.     

Low Rates of African American Participation in Genetic Counseling and Testing for BRCA1/2 Mutations: Racial Disparities or Just a Difference?

Low rates of genetic counseling among African American women have generated concerns about disparities; however, to the extent that women's decisions to accept or decline counseling are consistent with their values, then lower participation may reflect preferences and not disparities. We evaluated the extent to which women were satisfied with their decision about participating in genetic counseling for BRCA1/2 mutations and identified variables that were associated significantly with satisfaction. Prospective study of decision satisfaction with 135 African American women who had a minimum 5% prior probability of having a BRCA1/2 mutation. Decision satisfaction was evaluated one month after women were offered participation in genetic counseling using a structured questionnaire. Women were satisfied with their participation decision; more than 80% reported that their decision was consistent with their family values. However, women who declined pre-test counseling had significantly lower satisfaction scores. Our findings highlight the importance ensuring that racial differences that are due to preferences and values are not misclassified as disparities in order to identify and address the root causes of disparate treatment.     

Applied Social Psychology: A Critical Theoretical Perspective

The purpose of this analysis is to review, through a critical theoretical lens, social psychology applied to work and organisations. In our reading of the applied social psychological literature four key issues emerged. These include the valorisation of a positivist epistemology, an owner/management perspective on workplace issues, a focus on intra‐psychic variables or internal mental states when accounting for organisational problems, and the ignoring of moral and ethical commitments in determining workplace research and practice. Each of these issues is then further analysed in light of insights from the field of Critical Management Studies. This alternative approach to organisational behaviour points to the ways in which applied social psychological theory and practice have the potential to disadvantage workers.     

Asking Parents to Prepare Children for an Event: Altering Parental Instructions Influences Children's Recall

The authors investigated whether manipulating parents' goals regarding their discussion of an upcoming staged event with their 6-year-old children differentially influenced the children's recall. Parents (n = 62) were asked to prepare their child for a staged novel event—“visiting the pretend zoo”—to take place 1 day later. One group (inform) was asked to simply tell their child about the event, whereas a second group (discuss) was asked to engage their child in conversation and seek their child's perspective. A third group of parents (control) read an unrelated story to their child. Relative to parents in the control and inform conditions, parents in the discuss condition engaged their children in richer, more diverse, and complex conversation and their children made more contributions to the conversation. When their recall was tested 1 week later, however, children in the inform condition, relative to the discuss and control conditions, recalled more correct information overall. The reports of children in the inform and discuss conditions were highly accurate, and more so than those of children in the control condition. The findings and their possible underlying mechanisms are discussed.     

Cognitive neutralising strategies and their use across differing stressor types

Abstract

Three studies are described which investigate the kinds of strategies that individuals use to devalue the threatening meaning of a stressor (cognitive neutralising strategies, CNS). These studies identified seven factorially independent constructs corresponding to Downward Comparison, Positive Reappraisal, Cognitive Disengagement, Optimism, Faith in Social Support, Denial and Life Perspective. The use of CNS was highly correlated with the use of problem-focused coping strategies regardless of stressor type, but associated with the use of avoidance coping and emotion-focused coping only in the case of certain stressor types. The role of CNS in the coping process is discussed in the light of the present results.     

Persistent impairments in hippocampal function following a brief series of photoperiod shifts in rats

The impact of an acute circadian disruption on learning and memory in male and female rats was examined. Circadian disruption was elicited using a brief series of photoperiod shifts. Previous research using male rats showed that acute circadian disruption during acquisition of a spatial navigation task impaired long-term retention and that chronic circadian disruption impaired acquisition of the same task. However, the long-term effects of acute circadian disruption following circadian re-entrainment and whether sex differences in response to circadian disruption exist are still unknown. For the present study, rats were trained on the standard, spatial version of the Morris water task (MWT) and a visual discrimination task developed for the eight-arm radial maze. After reaching asymptotic performance, behavioural training was terminated and the experimental group experienced a series of photoperiod shifts followed by circadian re-entrainment. Following circadian re-entrainment, the subjects were given retention tests on the MWT and visual discrimination task. Following retention testing, an extra-dimensional shift using the eight-arm radial maze was also performed. An acute episode of circadian disruption elicited via photoperiod shifts negatively impacted retention of spatial memory in male and female rats. Retention of the visual discrimination task and the ability to detect extra-dimensional shifts were not impaired. The observed impairments on the MWT indicate that hippocampal representations are susceptible to a small number of photoperiod shifts even if the association is acquired prior to rhythm manipulation and retention is assessed following rhythm stabilization. Effects were limited to a hippocampus-dependent task, indicating that impairments are specific, not global.