The Unconscious Consumer: Effects of Environment on Consumer Behavior

In this article, we argue that consumer behavior is often strongly influenced by subtle environmental cues. Using grocery shopping as an example (or a “leitmotif,” if you wish), we first argue that the traditional perspective on consumer choice based on conscious information processing leaves much variance to be explained. Instead, we propose that many choices are made unconsciously and are strongly affected by the environment. Our argument is based on research on the perception–behavior link and on automatic goal pursuit.     

Magnitude of force perception errors during static contractions of the knee extensors in healthy young and elderly individuals

The accuracy of force perception during muscular contraction has not been studied extensively, despite its importance in rehabilitation and training. The purpose of this study was to quantify the errors made by healthy young and elderly individuals in their perceptions of force produced at the knee. Four different tasks were used to evaluate the perception of force and the effect of a sensory-motor reference and simultaneous contraction on the accuracy of perception. The absolute errors were similar between groups, with values of 11.9% to 16.3%, depending on the task. The raw perception errors were greater for high levels of force (>50% of the maximal voluntary contraction, or MVC), indicating an overestimation of the forces produced for both groups. At 70% MVC, the sensory-motor reference reduced raw perception errors, and the simultaneous contraction improved the accuracy of force production. Healthy young and elderly individuals had about the same capacity to judge the muscular force of their knee extensors. Therapists involved in the training of active?elderly?individuals should be aware that the accuracy of force perception is not perfect and that these clients have the same ability as young individuals to perceive their knee extension strength.     

Prevalence of DSM-IV borderline personality disorder in two community samples: 6,330 English 11-year-olds and 34,653 American adults

This study had two main objectives. The first was to assess the prevalence of DSM-IV borderline personality disorder and its constituent symptoms in a community sample of late-latency children. The second was to compare these rates to those found in a community sample of American adults. A birth cohort of 6,330 11-year-old children in Bristol, England, was interviewed concerning borderline psychopathology in 2002-2004. A community sample of 34,653 American adults was interviewed about borderline psychopathology in 2004-2005. Rates of chronic emptiness, physically self-damaging acts, and stormy relationships were very similar in both samples (<2% difference). However, a significantly higher percentage of children than adults reported being angry and moody. In contrast, a significantly higher percentage of adults than children reported being paranoid/dissociated, having a serious identity disturbance, being impulsive, and making frantic efforts to avoid abandonment. In addition, a significantly higher percentage of adults than children met DSM-IV criteria for BPD (5.9% vs. 3.2%). Statistically significant but clinically minor gender differences were also found between girls and boys as well as men and women. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that late-latency children are about half as likely as adults to meet DSM-IV criteria for BPD. They also suggest that gender does not play a defining role in symptom expression.     

Self‐regulation and well‐being: The influence of identity and motives

The relationship between self‐regulatory capacities and self‐esteem as well as well‐being is examined by a mediation model that views self‐regulation as promoting the development of identity achievement which, in turn, is expected to be associated with well‐being. Among secondary school students (Study 1) identity achievement mediated the association between the self‐regulatory capacity of attention control and self‐esteem. In Study 2 (university students), the mediational effect of identity achievement was found for the relationship between the self‐regulatory capacity of action control and well‐being. Explicit motives moderated this association. In sum, a firm identity enhances well‐being by lending a sense of continuity to one's life. However, explicit motives have a substitution effect by giving direction to life when lacking firm identity commitments. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Facing Europe: visualizing spontaneous in-group projection

Individuals perceive their own group to be more typical of a shared superordinate identity than other groups are. This in-group projection process has been demonstrated with both self-report and indirect measures. The two studies reported here extend this research to the visual level, specifically, within the domain of faces. Using an innovative reverse-correlation approach, we found that German and Portuguese participants' visual representations of European faces resembled the appearance typical for their own national identity. This effect was found even among participants who explicitly denied that one nation was more typical of Europe than the other (Study 1). Moreover, Study 2 provides experimental evidence that in-group projection is restricted to inclusive superordinate groups, as the effect was not observed for visual representations of a category ("Australian") that did not include participants' in-group. Implications for the in-group projection model, as well as for the applicability of reverse-correlation paradigms, are discussed.     

Generalized relational matching by guinea baboons (Papio papio) in two-by-two-item analogy problems

Analogical reasoning is considered the hallmark of human reasoning, but some studies have demonstrated that language- and symbol-trained chimpanzees can also reason analogically. Despite the potential adaptive value of this ability, evidence from other studies strongly suggests that other nonhuman primates do not have this capacity for analogical reasoning. In our three experiments, 6 of 29 baboons acquired the ability to perform a relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) task in which pairs of shapes composed relational displays. Five of these 6 monkeys then transferred this ability to RMTS tasks using novel exemplars of identity (elements in a pair are the same) and nonidentity (elements in a pair are different) relations. This transfer occurred even on trials in which the incorrect pair shared an element with the sample pair with which it was being compared. The baboons retained this ability 12 months later. The findings from our study of symbol-naive monkeys indicate that although language and symbol training facilitate conceptual thinking in nonhuman primates, such training is not a prerequisite for analogical reasoning.     

Exploring the informational sources of metaperception: the case of Change Blindness Blindness

Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as “Change Blindness” (CB). They are, in addition, “blind to their own blindness”. A common explanation of this “Change Blindness Blindness” (CBB) is that it derives from an inadequate, “photographical” folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their self-evaluations on two activity-dependent cues, namely search time and perceived success in prior trials. These cues were found to influence self-evaluation in two orthogonal ways: success-feedback influenced self-evaluation in a global, contextual way, presumably by recalibrating the norm of adequacy for the task. Search time influenced it in a local way, predicting the success of a given trial from its duration.     

Correlates of Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms Among the Caregivers of Leukemic Children

This study aims to reveal correlates of depressive and anxiety symptoms among the Turkish caregivers of leukemic children (n?=?100). The effects of demographic variables, satisfaction of the basic needs, performance on daily activities, and coping strategies on outcome variables were investigated by hierarchical regression. Accordingly, older age, lower reported income, higher number of other children to be looked after, lower levels of satisfaction of basic needs, and more use of emotion focused coping were associated with higher levels of both depressive and anxiety symptoms. Moreover, caregivers with lower education reported more depressive symptoms, and higher performance on daily activities predicted more anxiety symptoms.