How consumers “see” a visually warm store: Differences between affective and cognitive processors

Store atmosphere can influence shoppers' perceptions and behaviors. This research contributes to the literature by showing that a visually warm store atmosphere can induce psychological warmth perception among in‐store consumers. An empirical study was conducted to investigate the effect of warmth through a visually warm or cold store atmosphere on consumers' perceptions/behaviors and the moderating role of consumers' processing styles. Results (N = 181) showed that a visually warm (vs. cold) atmosphere induces the perception of intimacy toward the store among affective processors and the perception of assortment similarity among cognitive processors. Such perceptions were found to mediate the effect of the visually warm atmosphere on consumers' approach behaviors toward the store. Based on the grounded cognition theory, this study extends the current knowledge of the warmth experience on psychological perceptions to a retail context. Findings not only contribute to the extant literature of store atmospherics and retailing but they also offer practical guidelines for retailers and designers of store environments.     

How does context affect assessments of facial emotion? The role of culture and age

People from Asian cultures are more influenced by context in their visual processing than people from Western cultures. In this study, we examined how these cultural differences in context processing affect how people interpret facial emotions. We found that younger Koreans were more influenced than younger Americans by emotional background pictures when rating the emotion of a central face, especially those younger Koreans with low self-rated stress. In contrast, among older adults, neither Koreans nor Americans showed significant influences of context in their face emotion ratings. These findings suggest that cultural differences in reliance on context to interpret others' emotions depend on perceptual integration processes that decline with age, leading to fewer cultural differences in perception among older adults than among younger adults. Furthermore, when asked to recall the background pictures, younger participants recalled more negative pictures than positive pictures, whereas older participants recalled similar numbers of positive and negative pictures. These age differences in the valence of memory were consistent across culture.     

Long-term psychological sequelae of smoking cessation and relapse.

The authors examined whether smoking cessation and relapse were associated with changes in stress, negative affect, and smoking-related beliefs. Quitters showed decreasing stress, increasing negative health beliefs about smoking, and decreasing beliefs in smoking's psychological benefits. Quitters became indistinguishable from stable nonsmokers in stress and personalized health beliefs, but quitters maintained stronger beliefs in the psychological benefits of smoking than stable nonsmokers. Relapse was not associated with increases in stress or negative affect However, relapsers increased their positive beliefs about smoking and became indistinguishable from smokers in their beliefs. For quitters, decreased stress and negative beliefs about smoking may help maintain successful cessation. However, for relapsers, declining health risk perceptions may undermine future quit attempts.     

Developmental trajectories of marijuana use from adolescence to adulthood: personality and social role outcomes

Longitudinal trajectories of marijuana use from adolescence into adulthood were examined for adverse life-course outcomes among African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. Data for marijuana use were analyzed at four points in time and on participants' personality attributes, work functioning, and partner relations in adulthood using growth mixture modeling. Each of the three marijuana-use trajectory groups (maturing-out, late-onset, and chronic marijuana-users) had greater adverse life-course outcomes than a nonuse or low-use trajectory group. The chronic marijuana-use trajectory group was highly associated with criminal behavior and partners' marijuana use in adulthood. Treatment programs for marijuana use should also directly address common adverse life-course outcomes users may already be experiencing.     

Therapist Use-of-Self Orientations Questionnaire: A Reliability and Validity Study

This article describes the development of the Therapist Use-of-Self Orientation Questionnaire (TUSO-Q), an instrument designed to measure therapists’ use-of-self orientations while working with clients. A total of 373 therapists participated in this study. Exploratory factor analysis in the structural equation modeling context revealed three different therapist use-of-self orientations: Transpersonal, Contextual, and Instrumental. The final model provided an excellent fit to the data. TUSO-Q scores exhibited satisfactory evidence of internal consistency reliability and construct validity. Implications for the scale’s use in clinical research and training are discussed.     

Cognitive control of a simple mental image in patients with obsessive--compulsive disorder

The nature of obsessions has led researchers to try to determine if the main problem in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is impaired inhibitory control. Previous studies report that the effort to suppress is one of the factors that increase the frequency of obsessive thoughts. Based on these results and those of the present study that suggest inferior parietal lobe (IPL) abnormality in OCD and findings of a recent study that reported the importance of the right posterior parietal cortex in cognitive control of a simple mental image, the present cognitive control paradigm study aimed to determine whether there is a difference in brain dynamics between OCD patients and non-obsessive controls while performing tasks that necessitate cognitive control of a simple mental image, and whether the right posterior parietal region is one of the regions in which a difference in activity between the OCD patients and controls would be observed. Functional brain imaging was performed while the participants attempted to suppress, imagine, or manipulate a mental image. The general linear model showed that there was a main effect of group and main effect of task. Accordingly, in all contrasts (suppression minus free-imagination, erasing minus free-imagination, and imagination minus free-imagination), the right IPL, right posterior cingulate cortex, and right superior frontal gyrus activity were lower in the OCD patients than in the healthy controls. These results and the observed correlations between activity levels, and symptom and subjective performance scores are discussed. In conclusion, the results of the present study and those of previous studies suggest that the main problem in OCD might be difficulty activating the right frontoparietal networks during tasks that require cognitive control, which might result in the intrusiveness of obsessive thoughts.     

It's a question? Infants attend differently to yes/no questions and declaratives

We examined infants’ perception of the intonational characteristics of yes-no questions and declarative sentences in English. Both infants habituated to questions and those habituated to declaratives preferred the question forms at test, suggesting that infants process these two sentence types differently.     

Basketball training increases striatum volume

The striatum is associated with the learning and retention of motor skills. Several studies have shown that motor learning induces neuronal changes in the striatum. We investigated whether macroscopic change in striatum volume occurs in a segment of the human population who learned basketball-related motor skills and practiced them throughout their entire athletic life. Three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging volumetry was performed in basketball players and healthy controls, and striatum volumes were compared based on basketball proficiency, region and side. We identified morphological enlargement in the striatum of basketball players in comparison with controls. Our results suggest that continued practice and repetitive performance of basketball-related motor skills may induce plastic structural changes in the human striatum.