Effects of subcultural differences on country and product evaluations

Most cross‐cultural studies on country of origin or product‐country image (PCI) effects have implicitly assumed that national markets are composed of homogeneous consumers. Although many investigations in this field are described as cross‐cultural, most are in fact cross‐national. The overarching hypothesis of the present research is that PCI effects may vary across subcultures within a country. The results indicate that subcultural differences exist in the evaluation of culturally affiliated countries and their products. Cognitive responses converged to show that consumers' perceived linkages significantly influence the weight given to the country of origin in product evaluations. Several implications for managers and academic researchers are discussed. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Expressing and receiving negative emotions: Comments on Myisha Cherry's The Case for Rage

Responding to Myisha Cherry's The Case for Rage, I discuss how the book touches on the difficulties of disentangling emotions and their expressions. Then I suggest two ways in which destructive rage might be good, one on Kantian grounds and another via extension from experience. Finally, I raise the issue of whether there might be other Lordean emotions.     

Investigating secondary‐distinctiveness‐based effects in aging and Alzheimer's disease patients

The aim of the present study was 2‐fold. First, two experiments were devised to further investigate secondary distinctiveness‐based effects in relation to aging. By using a repeated study‐test procedure, it aimed at restoring the bizarreness effect (Experiment 1) or at amplifying the orthographic distinctiveness (OD) effect in older adults (Experiment 2). Second, by including Alzheimer's disease patients (AD patients) in both experiments, it also aimed at instigating research on secondary distinctiveness‐based effects in relation to Alzheimer disease. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that a repeated study‐test procedure may to some extent facilitate the free recalling of bizarre images in older adults. However, the benefit of such procedure does not seem to be durable in older adults (no bizarreness effect for the last study‐test cycle) and is inefficient in AD patients. Surprisingly, for both older adults and AD patients, results of Experiment 2 revealed a similar OD effect across all study‐test cycles. The findings of both experiments were related to previous work suggesting that the bizarreness effect and the OD effect are mediated by different processing.     

Duration and numerical estimation in right brain‐damaged patients with and without neglect: Lack of support for a mental time line

Previous studies have shown that left neglect patients are impaired when they have to orient their attention leftward relative to a standard in numerical comparison tasks. This finding has been accounted for by the idea that numerical magnitudes are represented along a spatial continuum oriented from left to right with small magnitudes on the left and large magnitudes on the right. Similarly, it has been proposed that duration could be represented along a mental time line that shares the properties of the number continuum. By comparing directly duration and numerosity processing, this study investigates whether or not the performance of neglect patients supports the hypothesis of a mental time line. Twenty‐two right brain‐damaged patients (11 with and 11 without left neglect), as well as 11 age‐matched healthy controls, had to judge whether a single dot presented visually lasted shorter or longer than 500 ms and whether a sequence of flashed dots was smaller or larger than 5. Digit spans were also assessed to measure verbal working memory capacities. In duration comparison, no spatial‐duration bias was found in neglect patients. Moreover, a significant correlation between verbal working memory and duration performance was observed in right brain‐damaged patients, irrespective of the presence or absence of neglect. In numerical comparison, only neglect patients showed an enhanced distance effect for numerical magnitude smaller than the standard. These results do not support the hypothesis of the existence of a mental continuum oriented from left to right for duration. We discuss an alternative account to explain the duration impairment observed in right brain‐damaged patients.     

The effect of the two feet-in-the-door technique on tobacco deprivation

The ‘Foot-in-the-door’ (FITD) is a well-known compliance technique that increases compliance with a request. Many investigations on this paradigm have generally used prosocial requests to test the effect of the technique. A new evaluation of the effect of the FITD technique was carried out on tobacco deprivation. A two feet-in-the-door technique in which the target request was preceded by two small target requests was used to encourage students to stop smoking for 24 h. The results were compared with two single foot-in-the- door procedures in which the final request was only preceded by one small request, as well as with a control condition using only a 24 h stop-smoking request. Results showed that the single FITD and the two feet-in-the-door procedures were effective to increase verbal compliance (accepting to stop smoking) but only the two feet-in-the-door technique significantly increased behavioural compliance (not smoking for 24 h) with the request.     

Algorithmic complexity for short binary strings applied to psychology: a primer

As human randomness production has come to be more closely studied and used to assess executive functions (especially inhibition), many normative measures for assessing the degree to which a sequence is randomlike have been suggested. However, each of these measures focuses on one feature of randomness, leading researchers to have to use multiple measures. Although algorithmic complexity has been suggested as a means for overcoming this inconvenience, it has never been used, because standard Kolmogorov complexity is inapplicable to short strings (e.g., of length l?≤?50), due to both computational and theoretical limitations. Here, we describe a novel technique (the coding theorem method) based on the calculation of a universal distribution, which yields an objective and universal measure of algorithmic complexity for short strings that approximates Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity.     

Assessing Specific Discipline Techniques: A Mixed-Methods Approach

This study explored, in a community sample of mothers of toddlers, parenting beliefs and values, to gain insight into the parent–child relationship. Acceptance of specific discipline techniques (DTs), and their actual use in daily life were examined. A mixed-methods approach comprising three different methods was used: (1) parenting beliefs and values were explored with Q-methodology; (2) acceptance of the DTs was assessed with the questionnaire Dimensions of Discipline Inventory; and (3) actual use of those DTs in daily-life incidents of discipline was documented using ecological momentary assessment for ten consecutive days. The results showed the mothers’ parenting beliefs and values reflected a warm parent–child relationship. The mothers rated explaining rules, timeout, removal of privileges, and social reinforcement as moderately to highly acceptable. However, planned ignoring received a low acceptance rating. Mothers’ high acceptability ratings of the DTs contrasted with moderate use when they were faced with their misbehaving child, with the exception of explaining rules, which was always manifested. Yelling and spanking received the lowest acceptance ratings. Nonetheless, in daily life, yelling was employed as often as timeout. These findings suggest the need for more attention to be paid to both acceptance and daily use of specific DTs in order to highlight DTs which parents may have difficulty implementing.     

The Delay Before Recall Changes the Remembered Duration of 15‐minute Video Sequences

The aim of this study was to determine if the passage of time changes the memory of the duration of joyful or sad events. Participants were asked to look at a series of brief videos lasting 15 minutes and to estimate retrospectively and verbally (with chronometric units) the duration of this 15‐minute period. There were two independent variables: the emotion conditions (joy, sadness and neutral) and the recall conditions (immediately after the presentation of videos, 1 week later or 1 month later). The results show that the estimated time is largely overestimated in the 1‐week and 1‐month condition but not when the recall is immediate. This effect applies to each emotional condition, but there was no significant difference between the emotion conditions. The effect of emotion on the estimation of long intervals judged retrospectively seems minimal in comparison with the cognitive effect associated with the passage of time. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Physical and perceptual accuracy of upright and inverted face drawings

This study considers the conception that drawing or copying a face that is vertically inverted will improve the accuracy of the drawing by preventing holistic interference. We used a novel parameterized face space both for generating face stimuli and for measuring the physical accuracy of drawings. One group of participants (the artists) were asked to draw 16 parameterized faces (eight upright and eight inverted). We computed two physical measures of accuracy by comparing the face-space representation of each drawing to the original face. A second and third group of participants (the raters) compared the similarity between each original face and each pair of drawings of that face (one upright and one inverted per artist). For the second group, all faces were presented upright; for the third group, all faces were presented inverted. Our results showed that upright drawings were more accurate than inverted drawings, both in terms of the physical face-space measure and in terms of the perceptual judgments for both orientations. Our data suggest that holistic processing may aid rather than hinder face drawing accuracy.