Human crowding and store messiness: Drivers of retail shopper confusion and behavioral intentions

With today's cut‐throat competition, brick and mortar retailers are engaging in various in‐store elements like ambience, visual design, and social factors to entice consumers. However, these environmental stimuli if not used properly can lead to retail shopper confusion that can negatively influence shopper behavioral intentions. Drawing on the theoretical argument that information overload facilitates retail shopper confusion, two experimental studies are conducted. The findings of both studies suggest a main effect of human crowding and store messiness for each dimension of retail shopper confusion—irritation, inefficiency, and helplessness. Mediating role of retail shopper confusion between human crowding, store messiness, and shopping behavioral intentions is also examined. Interactive impact of human crowding and store messiness suggests store messiness to be more problematic. The moderating role of shopping motivations (task vs. recreational) is also examined that suggests the negative effect of retail shopper confusion for consumers pursuing recreational shopping motivations. These findings across the two studies offer a new perspective that recommend the importance of organized retail store environments. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

M. Chirimuuta's Adverbialism about Color

M. Chirimuuta's Outside Color is a rich and lovely book. I enjoyed reading it and benefitted from reflecting on its provocative ideas. I begin by briefly placing the book's principal thesis in its historical context, and I go on to reflect on two objections that might be lodged against this thesis.     

Feeling Good,Being Intentional,and Their Relationship to Two Types of Creativity at Work

In recent years, scholars have empirically demonstrated that creativity can be described as radical or incremental creativity. In efforts to better understand the nomological networks underlying radical and incremental creativity, this study explored the role that positive emotions directly and indirectly plays in predicting each type of creativity. Further, whether the nature of these mediated relationships varied differentially as a function of employees’ tendency to also engage in such purposeful activities as monitoring their creative behaviors and deepening their expertise was also explored. The resultant moderated-mediation model was tested in a field study of 129 professional employees in a large North American consumer products organization. Results indicated that positive emotions influence incremental and radical creativity differentially through fun, and that the degree to which individuals engage in monitoring impacts their levels of creativity. Implications and future directions for research and practitioners are discussed.     

Rapid communication: Global-local processing affects recognition of distractor emotional faces

Recent studies have shown links between happy faces and global, distributed attention as well as sad faces to local, focused attention. Emotions have been shown to affect global-local processing. Given that studies on emotion-cognition interactions have not explored the effect of perceptual processing at different spatial scales on processing stimuli with emotional content, the present study investigated the link between perceptual focus and emotional processing. The study investigated the effects of global-local processing on the recognition of distractor faces with emotional expressions. Participants performed a digit discrimination task with digits at either the global level or the local level presented against a distractor face (happy or sad) as background. The results showed that global processing associated with broad scope of attention facilitates recognition of happy faces, and local processing associated with narrow scope of attention facilitates recognition of sad faces. The novel results of the study provide conclusive evidence for emotion-cognition interactions by demonstrating the effect of perceptual processing on emotional faces. The results along with earlier complementary results on the effect of emotion on global-local processing support a reciprocal relationship between emotional processing and global-local processing. Distractor processing with emotional information also has implications for theories of selective attention.     

Douglas Campbell's Startling Alternative to Traditional Paradigms of Pauline SoteriologyThe Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul – By Douglas Campbell

This book delivers the most comprehensive attack on the dominant scholarly paradigm of Pauline soteriology, which Campbell calls Justification Theory. He indicts this paradigm as individualistic, contractual, conditional, incoherent, and, put simply, bad theology. He proposes, instead, a rereading of the key passages in Romans 1–4 (especially 1.18–3.20) which supposedly support Justification Theory. His alternative theory is ‘apocalyptic’ insofar as it is ‘unconditional, revelatory, transformational, and liberational’. While many of his critiques of Justification Theory are illuminating and offer hearty food for thought, his alternative does not appear to be grounded enough in a plain reading of the text to offer the most convincing interpretation. Nevertheless, it is an important work that needs to be digested by Pauline interpreters and anyone interested in biblical soteriology.     

Analysing trends in subjective well-being in 15 European countries, 1973–2002

Previous empirical research has been unable to find a sufficient correlation between subjective well-being and per capita income, being hampered by limited longitudinal information and an inability to account for the predictions of competing theories. We bring new evidence to this question by exploiting a long and complete time-series from the Eurobarometer Survey, 1973–2002 allowing an examination of trends in life satisfaction across 15 European countries employing a modified version of Kendall’s Tau. Our results show that while current GDP growth does not affect trends in well-being, accelerations in GDP growth do. In addition, faster GDP growth and faster growth of government consumption than in neighbouring countries induces positive trends in life satisfaction. Our findings are consistent with the predictions of aspirations theory and the theory of reference group comparisons.     

The association between prenatal exposure to cigarettes and infant and maternal negative affect

This study examined the association between prenatal exposure to cigarettes and infant and maternal negative affect. Participants were 115 mother-infant dyads (69 prenatally exposed to cigarettes and 46 nonexposed). Infant and maternal negative affect were both assessed during the neonatal period (2-4 weeks of age) and again at 7 months of infant age. Results indicated that only prenatal exposure to cigarettes predicted infant negative affect. Infants who were prenatally exposed to more cigarettes had higher levels of negative affect at both time points. Furthermore, regression analyses indicated that both infant and maternal negative affect during the neonatal period predicted maternal negative affect at 7 months of age. These results highlight the importance of considering the reciprocal relationship between infant and maternal behavior when examining developmental outcomes among infants prenatally exposed to cigarettes.     

Improved statistics for contrasting means of two samples under non‐normality

This paper presents the asymptotic expansions of the distributions of the two‐sample t‐statistic and the Welch statistic, for testing the equality of the means of two independent populations under non‐normality. Unlike other approaches, we obtain the null distributions in terms of the distribution and density functions of the standard normal variable up to n^?1, where n is the pooled sample size. Based on these expansions, monotone transformations are employed to remove the higher‐order cumulant effect. We show that the new statistics can improve the precision of statistical inference to the level of o (n^?1). Numerical studies are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the improved statistics. Some general rules for practitioners are also recommended.