Attracting new customers to loyalty programs: The effectiveness of monetary versus nonmonetary loyalty programs

What type of reward attracts customers to loyalty programs? Given the increasing importance of loyalty programs, this question matters. Six sequential studies investigated whether monetary rewards universally attract people more than nonmonetary rewards. Results suggest that monetary rewards elicit a very robust attractiveness premium both on the level of individual rewards as well as on the level of entire reward programs. Across different industries, the more monetary loyalty program was consistently perceived as more attractive, and it was more likely to inspire intentions to join the program. Even in light of variations in consumption goals (hedonic vs. utilitarian), the effect persisted. The effect is not only consistent; it is also nonnegligible with medium effect sizes emerging in most settings. We discuss ensuing variations in effect sizes and conclude that monetarism holds a pervasive temptation for consumers that managers cannot ignore.     

Selecting decision strategies: The differential role of affect

This experiment sought to clarify the potential role of emotional feelings in the systematic impact of implicitly processed affective stimuli on mental effort mobilisation. Participants worked on an attention task during which they were primed with suboptimally presented happiness versus sadness expressions. Before the task, half the participants received a cue for the possible affective influence of “flickers” to be presented during the task. This manipulation usually reduces the impact of conscious feelings on resource mobilisation. As anticipated, sadness primes resulted in higher experienced task demand and higher mental effort (stronger cardiac contractility assessed as shortened pre-ejection period) than happiness primes. Most importantly, instead of reducing the prime effects on mental effort, the cue manipulation significantly increased participants’ effort in general, reflecting additional cognitive demand. The results speak against the idea that affect primes influence effort mobilisation by eliciting conscious emotional feelings.     

On Enhancing the Cross‐Cultural Comparability of Likert‐Scale Personality and Value Measures: A Comparison of Common Procedures

This study aims to evaluate a number of procedures that have been proposed to enhance cross‐cultural comparability of personality and value data. A priori procedures (anchoring vignettes and direct measures of response styles (i.e. acquiescence, extremity, midpoint responding, and social desirability), a posteriori procedures focusing on data transformations prior to analysis (ipsatization and item parcelling), and two data modelling procedures (treating data as continuous vs as ordered categories) were compared using data collected from university students in 16 countries. We found that (i) anchoring vignettes showed lack of invariance, so they were not bias‐free; (ii) anchoring vignettes showed higher internal consistencies than raw scores where all other correction procedures, notably ipsatization, showed lower internal consistencies; (iii) in measurement invariance testing, no procedure yielded scalar invariance; anchoring vignettes and item parcelling slightly improved comparability, response style correction did not affect it, and ipsatization resulted in lower comparability; (iv) treating Likert‐scale data as categorical resulted in higher levels of comparability; (v) factor scores of scales extracted from different procedures showed similar correlational patterning; and (vi) response style correction was the only procedure that suggested improvement in external validity of country‐level conscientiousness. We conclude that, although no procedure resolves all comparability issues, anchoring vignettes, parcelling, and treating data as ordered categories seem promising to alleviate incomparability. We advise caution in uncritically applying any of these procedures. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Contrasting the effects of suboptimally versus optimally presented affect primes on effort-related cardiac response

Participants worked on an easy versus difficult arithmetic task with integrated happiness versus sadness primes, presented either suboptimally (briefly and masked) or optimally (long and visible). As predicted by the IAPE model (Gendolla in International Journal of Psychophysiology 86:123–135, 2012. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2012.05.003), the affect primes moderated the task difficulty effect on mental effort in the suboptimal-prime condition: cardiac pre-ejection period response was stronger in the happiness/difficult than in the sadness/difficult condition and tended to be stronger in the sadness-easy than in the happiness-easy condition. These effects were reversed in the optimal-prime-presentation condition, suggesting behavior correction due to controlled prime processing. Moreover, neither suboptimally nor optimally presented affect primes had prime-congruent effects on conscious mood assessed via self-report. The results demonstrate differential effects of implicitly versus explicitly processed affect cues on mental effort and suggest that they can do so without inducing emotional feelings.     

Reliability and Validity of the Thai “Global Person Generated Index”, an Individualised Measure of Quality of Life

The “Global Person Generated Index” (GPGI) is an individualised measure of global quality of life (QoL). Individualised measures have been used within a health context, however until recently have been rarely used to explore global QoL. This paper establishes the GPGI’s validity and reliability in Thailand. Data were collected from participants in two sites in Northeast Thailand. Participants completed the Thai GPGI, the “Satisfaction with Life Scale”(SWLS), a modified “Positive and Negative Affect Scale” (PANAS) and provided demographic data. 81 participants provided data at T1. 70 participants completed data for test-retest (two week interval) reliability comparisons. Test-retest reliability correlation was 0.678 (p < 0.001) for participants reporting no change in QoL. GPGI correlated moderately with SWLS (0.381, p < 0.01) and PANAS scales (0.291 and −0.378, both p < 0.01), indicating validity. GPGI scores were related to health and correlated to a moderate degree with income (0.379, p < 0.05). GPGI scores did not show the expected differences in scores based on gender, although this may be owing to cultural issues. Areas nominated as important to QoL included family, money, house, health and employment, which mirrors items on other QoL scales and previous work with individualised measures. The Thai GPGI is reliable for group comparisons and valid. The difficulties of designing cross-cultural construct validity hypotheses are acknowledged. Areas nominated as important to QoL were diverse and largely asset based. The GPGI is recommended for use to explore global QoL and potentially useful for needs assessment and exploration of response shift.     

Olfaction in autism spectrum disorders: A systematic review

Olfactory function is a well-known early biomarker for neurodegeneration and neural functioning in the adult population, being supported by a number of brain structures that could be dysfunctioning in neurodegenerative processes. Evidence has suggested that atypical sensory and, particularly, olfactory processing is present in several neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In this paper, we present data obtained by a systematic literature review, conducted according to PRISMA guidelines, regarding the possible association between olfaction and ASDs, and analyze them critically in order to evaluate the occurrence of olfactory impairment in ASDs, as well as the possible usefulness of olfactory evaluation in such conditions. The results obtained in this analysis suggested a possible involvement of olfactory impairment in ASDs, underlining the importance of olfactory evaluation in the clinical assessment of ASDs. This assessment could be potentially included as a complementary evaluation in the diagnostic protocol of the condition. Methods for study selection and inclusion criteria were specified in advance and documented in PROSPERO protocol #CRD42014013939.     

Diagnosis and treatment of depression during pregnancy

Pregnancy has frequently been described as a time of affective well-being. However, a growing literature suggests that women are neither "protected" against new-onset or recurrence of depression during this time. Diagnosis and effective treatment of depression during pregnancy requires a careful weighing of risk of treatment which may include psychotropic medications against the risks associated with failure to adequately manage affective distress and its potential impact of maternal and fetal well-being. Treatment options during pregnancy are reviewed in the context of developing the most appropriate risk/benefit decision for individual patients with past or current depression who either anticipate pregnancy or who become pregnant.     

How prioritized is self-prioritization during stimulus processing?

Recent research has suggested that self-relevance automatically enhances stimulus processing (i.e., the self-prioritization effect). Notably, information associated with one’s self elicits faster responses than comparable material associated with other targets (e.g., friend, stranger). Challenging the assertion that self-prioritization is an obligatory process, here we hypothesized that self-relevance only facilitates performance when task sets draw attention to previously formed target-object associations. The results of two experiments were consistent with this viewpoint. Compared with arbitrary objects owned by a friend, those owned by the self were classified more rapidly when participants were required to report either the owner or identity of the items (i.e., semantic task set). In contrast, self-relevance failed to facilitate performance when participants judged the orientation of the stimuli (i.e., perceptual task set). These findings demonstrate the conditional automaticity of self-prioritization during stimulus processing.