Message-Laden Design Elements
Stereotypes' powerful effects
Stereotypes' powerful effects
Ties to evaluations and interpretations
Getting to "Yes!"
Recently completed research indicates consistent responses to music in multiple cultures. Putkinen, Zhou, Gan, Yang, Becker, Sams, and Nummenmas found that “emotional music evokes similar bodily sensations across cultures. . . . The emotions and bodily sensations evoked by music were similar across Western and Asian listeners. . . . The study was conducted in collaboration with Aalto University from Finland and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) as an online questionnaire survey.
Horton, Adam, and Galinsky’s work with clothing can likely be extended to other situations with selected designed elements. They share that “Enclothed cognition refers to the systematic influence that clothes can have on the wearer’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors through their symbolic meaning. It has attracted considerable academic and nonacademic interest. . . To determine whether the larger body of research on enclothed cognition possesses evidential value and replicable effects, we performed z-curve and meta-analyses using 105 effects from 40 studies across 24 articles. . . .
Tian, Alaei, and Rule study signals sent by an individual’s physical appearance; their findings can likely be extended to signals sent by design-related choices made by people. Tian and team report that they “examined whether cues to people’s music preferences in their physical appearance and expressive poses help to guide social interaction. We found that perceivers could detect targets’ music preferences from photos of their bodies, heads, faces, eyes, and mouths (but not hair) and that the targets’ apparent traits (e.g., submissiveness, neatness) undergirded these judgments.
Barbieri and colleagues probed the repercussions of positive, aesthetic-based experiences. They report that “aesthetic appreciation promoted curiosity-driven behaviour while it was negatively associated with anxiety. These results were consistent with the idea that aesthetic appreciation could act as a ‘valve’, prompting the individual to perceive curiosity (i.e. to consider novelty as a valuable opportunity to acquire new knowledge) rather than anxiety (i.e. to consider novelty as a risk to be avoided). . .
Turoman and Vergauwe evaluate what sorts of experiences we find most distracting. They report that they “examined the effects of the task relevance and multisensory nature of distractors on working memory performance under high and low memory load. . . . we found conclusive evidence against a difference in how unisensory and multisensory distractors affected working memory performance. . . . when distractors were made partly task relevant . . . multisensory distractors disrupted working memory performance more than unisensory distractors on average. . . .
Joye and Fennis studied the effects of line orientations on record album covers; it is likely that their findings can be generalized to other contexts. The researchers report that “Based on the perceptual preference for visual stimuli with cardinal (orthogonal) over oblique (tilted) line/edge orientations (a phenomenon known as the ‘oblique effect’), albums with a predominance of cardinal line/edge orientations in their artwork should perform better than albums with more oblique artwork, as indicated by the albums' market performance and consumers' listening behavior.
Researchers have learned that our experiences with TV and videos while we’re young influences our experiences later in life. The Heffler-lead team determined that “Greater early-life digital media exposures may be associated with atypical sensory processing.