Subjective Well-Being and Hedonic Editing: How Happy People Maximize Joint Outcomes of Loss and Gain

Hedonic editing refers to the decision strategy of arranging multiple events in time to maximize hedonic outcomes (Thaler in Market Sci 4:199–214, 1985). The present research investigated the relationship between subjective well-being and hedonic editing. In Study 1, we gave participants pairs of social or financial events and asked them to indicate their preferences regarding the sequence and interval length between the two events. Compared to participants with lower subjective well-being, those with higher subjective well-being preferred to experience a social gain (e.g., chatting with a close friend) temporally closer to a financial loss, suggesting that happy individuals are more inclined than less happy individuals to use positive social events as cross-domain buffers against loss. In Study 2, participants were asked to select the type of positive event they would want to experience after a negative event. Happy individuals displayed a stronger preference for social events. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Determinants of brand switching: the role of consumer inferences,brand commitment,and perceived risk

Previous research in the area of price discounts has generated a rich, but diverse and mixed body of literature. This research examines the role of consumer's brand commitment and product category risk in influencing the nature as well as valence of the inferences generated by consumers in response to price discounts. Our results provide insights regarding how consumers' responses to competitor inducements vary depending upon their brand commitment for the incumbent brand and perceived risk. Furthermore, we show that higher commitment consumers could resist an inducement from a competitor when they are able to generate negative, marketer‐related inferences. Our research suggests that consumers' inferences are critical than pure economic benefits in determining the effectiveness of discounts.     

PROsetta: An R Package for Linking Patient-Reported Outcome Measures

A common problem when using a variety of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) for diverse populations and subgroups is establishing a harmonized scale for the incommensurate outcomes. The lack of comparability in metrics (e.g., raw summed scores vs. scaled scores) among different PROs poses practical challenges in studies comparing effects across studies and samples. Linking has long been used for practical benefit in educational testing. Applying various linking techniques to PRO data has a relatively short history; however, in recent years, there has been a surge of published studies on linking PROs and other health outcomes, owing in part to concerted efforts such as the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS^®) project and the PRO Rosetta Stone (PROsetta Stone^®) project (www.prosettastone.org). Many R packages have been developed for linking in educational settings; however, they are not tailored for linking PROs where harmonization of data across clinical studies or settings serves as the main objective. We created the PROsetta package to fill this gap and disseminate a protocol that has been established as a standard practice for linking PROs.     

How children perceive fractals: Hierarchical self-similarity and cognitive development

The ability to understand and generate hierarchical structures is a crucial component of human cognition, available in language, music, mathematics and problem solving. Recursion is a particularly useful mechanism for generating complex hierarchies by means of self-embedding rules. In the visual domain, fractals are recursive structures in which simple transformation rules generate hierarchies of infinite depth. Research on how children acquire these rules can provide valuable insight into the cognitive requirements and learning constraints of recursion.     

Explaining Muslim Americans’ Opinions on Salient Issues

Despite numerous individual success stories of living the American dream, the Muslim American community still remains one of the most misunderstood and underrepresented minorities in the United States. This study investigates the views of this community by mapping and explaining members' investigates on a number of issues of social and political import. It shows that the issue attitudes of Muslim Americans are rather uniform on some social and non-social issues but very diverse on others. Moreover, it also shows that the differences of opinion that were uncovered can be explained by a variety of factors including a respondent's ethnic or national origin and how committed a respondent is to the practice of Islam, defined by the frequency of mosque attendance. While these results are temporally limited, they do show that this is a very diverse community and set a strong foundation for further quantitative and qualitative investigations of how Muslim Americans' religious practices, ethnic backgrounds, and socio-economic characteristics affect their essential social and political beliefs.     

Regulatory focus as a predictor of attitudes toward partitioned and combined pricing

Partitioned pricing is a widely used pricing strategy, but little is known about the buyer characteristics that influence its effectiveness. The current research contributes to the pricing literature by investigating the impact of regulatory focus on the perceived attractiveness of partitioned and combined pricing. In four studies, we hypothesized and found support for the idea that promotion focused individuals perceive partitioned prices to be more attractive than combined prices, while prevention focused individuals do not differentiate between the two pricing types. Our results also show that regulatory focus influences consumers' information processing style, which in turn leads to important differences in attitudes towards partitioned and combined pricing. Specifically, promotion focused consumers are more likely to engage in global processing and global processing is linked to preferences for partitioned (versus combined) prices.     

Dispositional Interferers and the Metaphysics of Superheroes

Axiomathes - Many recently released Hollywood films feature superheroes like Superman, Ironman, the Hulk, Optimus Prime, and so on who possess amazing superpower and defeat supervillains with...     

A threshold theory account of psychometric functions with response confidence under the balance condition

The study of thresholds for discriminability has been of long‐standing interest in psychophysics. While threshold theories embrace the concept of discrete‐state thresholds, signal detection theory discounts such a concept. In this paper we concern ourselves with the concept of thresholds from the discrete‐state modelling viewpoint. In doing so, we find it necessary to clarify some fundamental issues germane to the psychometric function (PF), which is customarily constructed using psychophysical methods with a binary‐response format. We challenge this response format and argue that response confidence also plays an important role in the construction of PFs, and thus should have some impact on threshold estimation. We motivate the discussion by adopting a three‐state threshold theory for response confidence proposed by Krantz (1969, Psychol. Rev., 76, 308–324), which is a modification of Luce's (1963, Psychol. Rev., 70, 61–79) low‐threshold theory. In particular, we discuss the case in which the practice of averaging over order (or position) is enforced in data collection. Finally, we illustrate the fit of the Luce–Krantz model to data from a line‐discrimination task with response confidence.     

Effects of International Student Counselors' Broaching Statements About Cultural and Language Differences on Participants' Perceptions of the Counselors

Undergraduates (N = 135) evaluated 1 of 4 simulated 1st counseling sessions. Two international counselors (Canadian and Korean) alternated between making or not making broaching statements about their language and cultural differences. Significant main effects for counselor nationality and interaction effects between counselor nationality and broaching were found. Participants perceived the Canadian counselor more positively and the Korean counselor less positively in the broaching condition. Participants' cognitive flexibility was a significant covariate of their perceptions. Un grupo de estudiantes universitarios (N = 135) evaluó 1 de 4 sesiones iniciales de consejería simuladas. Dos consejeros internacionales (canadiense y coreano) alternaron entre hacer comentarios o no para abordar las diferencias entre sus idiomas y culturas. Se encontraron efectos principales significativos en relación a la nacionalidad del consejero y una interacción entre la nacionalidad y el abordamiento. Los participantes percibieron al consejero canadiense de forma más positiva y al consejero coreano de forma menos positiva en la situación de abordamiento. La flexibilidad cognitiva de los participantes fue una covariable significativa en su percepción.