Attenuating focalism in affective forecasts of the commuting experience: Implications for economic decisions and policy making

Focalism is a cognitive bias that overweights the contribution of certain attributes to the consumption experience. This paper proposes that focalism afflicts choice of transport mode for commuting. A field study and two experiments provide evidence that commuting by bus is estimated to be less enjoyable than it is experienced to be and that driving to work is estimated to be more enjoyable than it is experienced to be. To the extent that commuting behavior is informed by subjective expected utility, commuters will inflict unanticipated costs on themselves and on society. Transport mode choice has external and dynamic consequences. Focalism in this domain implies welfare distortions that are worthy of policymakers’ attention. This paper develops a novel debiasing technique, Affective Averaging, that reveals and attenuates focalism in affective forecasts of commuting.     

Helping parents address their child's sexual behavior problems

This article describes a model for helping parents address their child's sexually inappropriate behavior. The model focuses on: supporting parents and facilitating their ability to accept their child's sexual problems, processing their affective and cognitive reactions, and devising a plan to help parents talk directly with their child about the sexually problematic behavior. Each step of the model outlines the rationale and interventions used to accomplish prescribed goals.     

‘Miss mum’: mind and affective experience of Korean learners identified with autism spectrum and cognitive difficulties

Responding to the call for culturally informed research on autism spectrum (AS) to allow for the provision of appropriate services, this paper qualitatively explores the affective experience of five Korean learners identified with AS and cognitive difficulties by listening to their voices. The learners, supported by the use of visual aids and a choice of their preferred mode of communication, expressed the complexity of their inner experience that encompassed abilities as well as difficulties. The findings highlight the commonalities of experience between Korean and non-Korean individuals with AS, along with some aspects specific to the Korean cultural context.     

A microcomputer program for evaluation analysis

Systematic program/policy evaluation generally involves processing a set of (I) goals to be achieved, (2) alternative programs or policies for achieving them, and (3) relations between goals and alternatives in order to arrive at the best alternative, combination, or allocation. The nature of evaluation thus leads to such analytic problems as (1) multiple dimensions on multiple goals, (2) multiple missing information, (3) multiple alternatives that are too many to determine the effects of each one, (4) multiple and possibly conflicting, constraints, and (5) the need for simplicity in spite of all that multiplicity. Microcomputers aid in overcoming all five problems by facilitating such methods as (1) paired comparisons, weighted raw scores, and part/whole percentaging to deal with multi-dimensionality, (2) sensitivity analysis to deal with missing information, (3) allocation percentages to deal with multiple alternatives, (4) sub-optimizing to deal with conflicting constraints, and (5) decision matrices to deal with the need for simplicity.     

The influence of need for closure on consumer’s choice behaviour

Consumers select a decision strategy in a purchase situation that best meets their goals for that situation. One of those possible goals is to obtain closure. The dimension need for closure (NFC) (vs. avoidance) reflects the desire for clear, definite, or unambiguous knowledge that will guide perception and action, as opposed to the undesirable alternative of ambiguity and confusion. The purpose of this study is to identify the influence of NFC on choice behaviour in a low involvement purchase situation. Both high (N=71) and low (N=71) NFC participants participated in a shopping experiment. In a simulated environment, participants were asked to choose repetitively between different brands within two low involvement product categories. We found significant differences between high and low NFC participants with regard to the amount of information sought, the amount of information used, the use of decision rules and the level of confidence in their decisions made. Marketing implications, limitations and directions for future research are also provided.     

Influence of Social Context on Children's Affect Regulation: A Functionalist Perspective

This study investigated the influence of social context (mothers, fathers, best friends, medium friends) and type of negative affect (anger, sadness, pain) on 66 second-grade and 71 fifth-grade children's goals and strategies for affect regulation. Hypothetical vignette methodology was used. Results indicated that children perceived parents to be more accepting of emotional expressivity than peers. Children endorsed instrumental, prosocial, and rule-oriented goals and verbal regulation strategies more for anger and sadness than pain. Girls endorsed affective more than aggressive strategies, whereas the opposite pattern held for boys. Older children endorsed more regulation strategies than younger children.     

Work as affective care: Visiting parents’ experiences of paid work abroad

This article offers the concept of ‘work as affective care’ to explore the entanglement between financial and affective in transnational life. This is discussed in relation to practices of paid work by nonmigrant older parents during visits to their adult children abroad, an understudied dimension in the visiting friends and relatives, transnational family, and ageing scholarship. Drawing on ethnographic research with Brazilian transnational families, the article makes two distinct contributions. First, it emphasizes the broader repertoire of activities performed during visits, namely paid work outside the family household. Second, it underscores a temporal dimension to visits, namely prolonged stays. The discussion reveals a financial dimension to care where paid work acts as a form of affective care across places and generations. While often described positively, the intersections between financial and affective goals are not always harmonious, and material and affective needs can prove difficult to reconcile.     

Integrated Emotion Processing in Infancy: Matching of Faces and Bodies

Accurate assessment of emotion requires the coordination of information from different sources such as faces, bodies, and voices. Adults readily integrate facial and bodily emotions. However, not much is known about the developmental origin of this capacity. Using a familiarization paired‐comparison procedure, 6.5‐month‐olds in the current experiments were familiarized to happy, angry, or sad emotions in faces or bodies and tested with the opposite image type portraying the familiar emotion paired with a novel emotion. Infants looked longer at the familiar emotion across faces and bodies (except when familiarized to angry images and tested on the happy/angry contrast). This matching occurred not only for emotions from different affective categories (happy, angry) but also within the negative affective category (angry, sad). Thus, 6.5‐month‐olds, like adults, integrate emotions from bodies and faces in a fairly sophisticated manner, suggesting rapid development of emotion processing early in life.     

The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions In and Around Social Movements

The recent explosion of cultural work on social movements has been highly cognitive in its orientation, as though researchers were still reluctant to admit that strong emotions accompany protest. But such emotions do not render protestors irrational; emotions accompany all social action, providing both motivation and goals. Social movements are affected by transitory, context-specific emotions, usually reactions to information and events, as well as by more stable affective bonds and loyalties. Some emotions exist or arise in individuals before they join protest groups; others are formed or reinforced in collective action itself. The latter type can be further divided into shared and reciprocal emotions, the latter being feelings that protestors have toward each other.     

Self-deception facilitates interpersonal persuasion

Self-deception is both commonplace and costly, which raises the question of what purpose it might serve. According to the dominant explanation in psychology and economics, self-deception is an intrapersonal process that fortifies and protects the self from threatening information. An alternative possibility is that self-deception evolved as an interpersonal strategy to persuade others. To investigate interpersonal aspects of self-deception, we gave people a persuasive task and measured their information processing biases and their persuasiveness. Results revealed that people who were financially motivated to persuade another person in a particular direction demonstrated a self-deceptive information processing bias consistent with their persuasive goals. This information processing bias led people to convince themselves of the veracity of their persuasive goal, and subsequently to be more persuasive to others. These findings suggest that self-deception has interpersonal benefits that offset its costs.     

Antwortlatenzzeiten in der survey-basierten Verhaltensforschung

The article reports about an empirical investigation on three moderator hypotheses claiming that the mode of information processing acts as a moderator for all effects specified by the “theory of reasoned action” (TRA) to explain behavioural intentions and actual behaviour. Our empirical research uses data of a 2005 German nationwide CATI-survey. When analyzing this data by estimating structural equation models we could detect the moderating function of response latencies. All the effects of behavioural attitudes and behavioural intentions specified by the TRA were moderated significantly when the model was used to explain intended and actual money donations. However, the TRA-effect of subjective norms was not infected by the mode of information processing. Our results show that classical models of attitude-behaviour research (e.g. TRA-model) can be improved theoretically and empirically by concepts developed in process models of attitude research (e.g. MODE-model).     

Part/whole percentaging as a useful method in policy/program evaluation

Part/whole percentaging analysis is a simple and meaningful way of evaluating alternative policies, decisions, or other options with multiple goals measured on different dimensions. That kind of analysis involves converting the raw scores of each alternative policy on each goal into a part/whole percentage by summing the raw scores for each goal and dividing each raw score by the total. One can then sum the part/whole percentages across the goals for each policy after assigning at least tentative relative weights to each goal. Part/whole percentages are added for goals that one would like to maximize and are subtracted for goals that one would like to minimize. Where the relative weight of a goal or score is too difficult to determine, one can determine the threshold value at which there is a tie between the tentative first choice and the second choice, and then just determine whether the actual value is above or below the threshold value. The aggregated part/whole percentages for each policy can be used to choose the best policy, the best subset of policies, or to allocate a budget across the policies in proportion to their aggregated part/whole percentages.     

‘Now I See The Difference’ — The Use Of Visual News Of Difference In Clinical Practice

Differences between events, values, attitudes and relationships provide therapists with the most meaningful data in the search for a circular perspective. Systems change is believed to be dependent on the reception of relevant information by the system. Traditionally, information has been collected verbally and Tomm (1984) outlines a schema of the types of difference questions. However, clinical practice suggests that these questions are not suitable to all clients. Difference questions may be confusing and unproductive when working with young children whose language skills are not fully developed and auditory memory limited. Adults whose verbal skills are limited or whose primary mode for processing information is not auditory, also have difficulty. An alternative visual method for collecting news of difference is proposed, using Tomm's (1984) categories as a basis. Case examples are given of this technique, at the stage of data collection and as a way of marking and reinforcing change through the course of therapy.     

Effects of Career Choice Intervention on Components of Career Preparation

This randomized experimental study (N = 1,034) examines both the direct and the indirect effects of the Towards Working Life intervention on 2 components of adolescents' career preparation: preparedness for career choice and attitude toward career planning. The intervention comprised a 1—week workshop program, the proximal goals of which were to enhance 9th graders' career choice preparedness and attitude toward career planning. Participants were assessed at baseline and immediately after the intervention. The results showed that the intervention had directly improved the students' career choice preparedness, which in turn increased positive attitude toward career planning. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.     

A Model of Choice for Public Policy

Punctuated equilibrium is supposed to be a viable alternativeto incrementalism, and, indeed, the authors of the model havesometimes made such claims. But punctuated equilibrium was developedto explain change in policy subsystems and does not serve asa complete model of policy choice in the same way that incrementalismhas served. This article develops a full-blown and viable modelof choice for public policy based on disproportionate informationprocessing. Its dynamics are based in the allocation of politicalattention to policy topics and the manner in which politicalsystems process information. The model leads directly to outcomesthat are consistent with punctuated equilibrium and are notgenerally consistent with incrementalism. Incrementalism, however,may be deduced from the model as a special case. The model isbest tested using stochastic process approaches. Incrementalismlogically must yield a normal distribution of outcomes, butdisproportionate information processing yields leptokurtic outcomes.Adding institutional constraints only makes the stochastic processimplications more severe. To support our arguments, we presentboth static and dynamic simulations of these processes. We alsoshow that these simulations are consistent with observationsof U.S. government budgets.     

Maternal Neurobiological Processing of Negative Adolescent Stimuli: Relations With Positive Parenting and Relationship Quality

We examined associations between maternal affective neurobiology and positive parenting in a study of 20 mothers of adolescents. Mothers underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during an emotion image task, rated parent‐adolescent relationship quality, and completed an adolescent interaction task in which positive parenting behaviors were observed. Maternal structure was associated with lower responsivity in emotional processing regions in the general negative image contrast and was related to greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation to negative adolescent images. Parent‐adolescent relationship quality was associated with lower precuneus activation to negative adolescent images. Findings are among the first to connect functional brain processing with observed parenting behaviors for parents of adolescent children, and underscore the relative importance of affective processing in parenting older children.     

Midlife Crisis in Men: Affective Organization of Personal Meanings

The purpose of this article is to explore thespecific affective organization of personal meanings inmidlife crisis in men. Midlife crisis is described as aprocess of intensive transition of the self including the reinterpretation of timeperspective, reevaluation of life values and goals,confrontation with death as a personal event in thefuture, and planning of the second half of life.Personal meanings referring to past, present, and future wereinvestigated using a self-confrontation method that issensitive to the affective properties of individualexperiences. The intensity of midlife crisis wasinvestigated by means of a Midlife Crisis Scale in a sampleof 104 men in Poland. Three groups, one high in midlifecrisis (N = 27), one medium (N = 37), and one low inmidlife crisis (N = 40) were compared. It was found that the high crisis group had a lower level ofaffect referring to self-enhancement, a lower level ofpositive affect, and a higher level of negative affectthan both other groups. Moreover, time perspective played a differential role in the organizationof the self: in an intragroup comparison of the mostinfluential personal meanings, the high crisis groupshowed a higher level of negative affect than positive affect for personal meanings referring to thefuture, but not for personal meanings referring to thepast and the present. The relevance of affectiveorganization for midlife crisis is discussed.     

Understanding public perceptions of genetically modified organisms in China: The role that heuristics play during digital media exposure

This study explicates the role that heuristics play in influencing Chinese public perceptions of genetically modified organisms (GMO) when they are exposed to digital media. According to the cognitive–affective continuum of heuristics, trust in scientists and negative emotions about GMOs are a cognition-oriented heuristic and an affect heuristic, respectively. The statistical results of an online survey (N?=?414) demonstrated that trust in scientists fully mediated digital media exposure and perceptions of the risks versus benefits of GMOs. In addition, negative emotions moderated the full mediation effect, showing that the indirect effect was stronger in individuals with low levels of negative emotions than in those with high levels of negative emotions. The mediating role of trust in scientists and the moderating role of negative emotions, the two heuristics applied in this study, indicated that when negative emotions were weak, laypeople were more likely to rely on scientists to judge the consequences of GMOs than systematically process the associated information by themselves. The findings have implications for reconsidering the importance of heuristic processing in building reasonable public perceptions of risk-laden technologies through the digital environment.     

The impact of caring on exchange choices and efficiencies: a modification of Boulding’s three social organizers

In this article, a system is developed for modeling traditional exchanges and those based, wholly or in part, on threats or interdependent utility functions (i.e., caring). This structure is used to analyze 1) the impact of interpersonal and intergroup perceptions on exchange choice and efficiency; 2) factors influencing firm decisions to accede to or resist coerced exchanges; and 3) conditions under which exchanges involving involuntary parties are rational. It is argued that, in addition to impacts on psychic returns, caring impacts on exchange efficiency through its effects on the quantity of information, due to attraction or aversion, and the quality of information processing, due to bias. Malevolence is never conducive to efficient exchange, but high levels of benevolence may also be detrimental. It also is shown that the economics of coerced exchanges bear strong similarities to analyses regarding price discrimination and using free samples for marketing. Firms are most likely to resist coerced exchanges if their marginal costs are rapidly rising or if acceding to the coerced exchange would reduce market demand. Possible trends in the importance of caring in exchange are also discussed.