Latest Blog Posts

Iamtrakul and Chayphong link urban design to human activity levels.  The duo probed “the correlation between the built environment and access to physical activities within distinct local contexts. . . . Results pertaining to the built environment indicate. . . . the importance for urban planning and design to prioritize enhancements in active transportation infrastructure and increase access to urban activity nodes. This can be achieved by strategically distributing physical activity opportunities and ensuring accessibility via active transportation and public transit.”

Pawinee Iamtrakul and Sararad Chayphong. 2024. “Analyzing the Link Between Built Environment and Physical Activity: A Spatial Study in Suburban Area.” Frontiers in Built Environment, vol. 10, doi:10.3389/fbuil.2024.1420020

Research by van Ittersum and colleagues indicates patterns in food selections that may be more generally applicable to situations involving healthy alternatives.  The investigators report that “Across two studies, one study with purchase data from a brick-and-mortar supermarket and one online experimental study, we empirically demonstrate that the relative healthiness of an initial product choice is indeed inversely related to the relative healthiness of the subsequent choice, regardless of the category of both products. That means: a relatively healthy choice is followed by a relatively unhealthier choice, and vice versa. . . . In the brick-and-mortar supermarket, the dynamics also become less pronounced as the shopping trip progresses.”

Koert van Ittersum, Martine van der Heide, Niels Holtrop, Tammo Bijmolt, and Jenny van Doorn. 2024. “Healthy Shopping Dynamics: The Healthiness of Sequential Grocery Choices.” Journal of Retailing, vol. 100, no. 1, pp. 24-40, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2023.09.002

Chuquichambi and colleagues confirm links between shapes and tastes.  They report that “People generally associate curved and symmetrical shapes with sweetness, while associating angular and asymmetrical shapes with the other basic tastes (e.g., sour, bitter). . . . The results replicate the general . . . correspondences between curved-sweet and symmetrical-sweet stimuli. Furthermore, participants tended to match sour and bitter tastes with angular and asymmetrical stimuli. . . . Liking for curved and symmetrical stimuli was higher than for angular and asymmetrical stimuli.”

Erick Chuquichambi, Enric Munar, Charles Spence, and Carlos Velasco. 2024. “Individual Differences in Sensitivity to Taste-Shape Crossmodal Correspondences.” Food Quality and Preference, vol. 115, 105110, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2024.105110

Cheng and Mukhopadhyay link culture and responses to natural things. They found “Using publicly available country-level data from 41 countries and individual-level experimental and survey data from the lab and online panels . . . that consumers do indeed differ in their preferences for relatively natural versus artificial healthcare options. These differences are influenced by the extent to which they subscribe to the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE)—a belief system that influences judgments and behaviors across diverse domains—such that people who subscribe strongly (vs. weakly) to the PWE are more likely to prefer natural healthcare options, because they are more averse to external intervention in general.”

Yimin Cheng and Anirban Mukhopadhyay.  “An Aversion to Intervention: How the Protestant Work Ethic Influences Preferences for Natural Healthcare.” Journal of Consumer Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae033

Via a literature review Vitale and Bonaiuto confirm the value of access to nature, whether that access involves spending time in nature, looking at images of nature, or something else.  They report that “nature exposure appears to have a positive impact on emotion regulation processes in general as well as on specific emotion regulation strategies, such as decreasing rumination and worry, and enhancing the use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies (i.e., mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal). . . . Nature exposure was explored through activities such as nature walks and the viewing of nature images. Furthermore, specific natural environments were investigated, including green spaces, coastal settings, and various sub-categories of green and blue spaces. . . . people are continually exposed to potentially emotion-arousing stimuli, and a range of emotion regulation strategies is used to adaptively manage emotions. . . . Emotion regulation refers to the strategies and skills individuals employ to effectively manage their emotions, adaptively cope with different situations, and attain desired emotional states.”

Valeria Vitale and Marino Bonaiuto. “The Role of Nature in Emotion Regulation Processes: An Evidence-Based Rapid Review.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102325

In a study that has repercussions for the design of an array of physical environments, Houchens and teammates evaluated how patients respond to different scenes behind physicians during telemedicine appointments.  They “assessed patient preferences for various visual backgrounds during video visits [with physicians]. . . . surveys included photographs of a model physician in different environments. . . . Patients selected their preferred environment, and a composite score was calculated across 6 domains (how knowledgeable, trustworthy, caring, approachable, and professional the physician appeared, and how comfortable the physician made the respondent feel). . . . The solid color background garnered a mean composite score of 7.7 [possible score range 1 to 10]. . . . The physician office displaying diplomas was rated highest across 5 domains (mean . . . composite score, 7.8. . . .) Significantly lower mean . . . scores were calculated for the bedroom (7.2 . . .) and kitchen (7.0 . . . ) environments. . . . Numerous studies have found nonverbal communication to be a modifiable determinant of patient trust and satisfaction.”

Nathan Houchens, Sanjay Saint, Latoya Kuhn, David Ratz, Jason Engle, and Jennifer Meddings. 2024. “Patient Preferences for Telemedicine Video Backgrounds.” JAMA Network Open, vol. 7, no. 5, e2411512, doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.11512

Via a series of experiments van der Sluis and colleagues probed the repercussions of different ways of thinking about disability. Their “research identifies and provides evidence of a disability preference stereotype whereby observers infer that disabled consumers prefer utilitarian products more than nondisabled consumers, and prefer hedonic products less than nondisabled consumers. . . . this stereotype occurs because of societal associations between physical disability and pity. Pity elicits a multidimensional response such that considering the interests of a disabled person increases feelings of personal discomfort, driving both an inclination to help (help-giving orientation) and a tendency to assess the perceived misfortune (misfortune appraisal) in parallel. . . . the help-giving orientation increases focus on functional (utilitarian) goods, while the misfortune appraisal decreases focus on pleasurable (hedonic) goods. . . . Representation of empowered disabled individuals in media can dampen the help-giving orientation, reducing inferred utilitarian preferences, while representation of disabled people partaking in daily pleasures through increased accessibility can reduce misfortune perceptions, increasing inferred hedonic preferences.”

Helen van der Sluis, Adriana Samper, Kirk Kristofferson, and Terri Hlava.  “How Do Physical Disability Cues Influence Assumptions About Consumer Tastes? Unpacking the Disability Preference Stereotype.” Journal of Consumer Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae031 

Malaie lead a team that linked different sorts of foraging behavior to creativity, further tying how we think now to how we thought during our earliest days as a species.  The investigators report that “According to accounts of neural reuse and embodied cognition, higher-level cognitive abilities recycle evolutionarily ancient mechanisms for perception and action. . . . we investigate whether creativity builds on our capacity to forage in space (‘creativity as strategic foraging’). We report systematic connections between specific forms of creative thinking—divergent and convergent—and corresponding strategies for searching in space. U.S. American adults completed two tasks designed to measure creativity. Before each creativity trial, participants completed an unrelated search of a city map. Between subjects, we manipulated the search pattern, with some participants seeking multiple, dispersed spatial locations and others repeatedly converging on the same location. Participants who searched divergently in space were better at divergent thinking but worse at convergent thinking; this pattern reversed for participants who had converged repeatedly on a single location. These results demonstrate a targeted link between foraging and creativity.”

Soran Malaie, Michael Spivey, and Tyler Marghetis. “Divergent and Convergent Creativity are Different Kinds of Foraging.” Psychological Science, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241245695 

Gollnhofer and associates set out to learn more about clutter.  They share that “Most relatively affluent consumers are fighting a losing battle with material disorder in their homes. No matter how hard they try to rein it in, material disorder always comes out on top. We argue that part of the continued obduracy of material disorder is because of its messy understanding. We clarify material disorder’s muddled conceptual boundaries by theorizing from an ethnographic investigation of consumers who recently dealt with material disorder through decluttering their homes. Leveraging twin analytical lenses that we label the possessive materialist and post-materialist lenses, we surface two distinct yet inter-dependent forms of disorder (disorder-as-untidiness, and disorder-as-clutteredness) that together plague consumers’ homes.”

Johanna Gollnhofer, Kushagra Bhatnagar, and Birte Manke.  “The Discomfort of Things! Tidying-Up and Decluttering in Consumers’ Homes.” Journal of Consumer Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae034

Halldorsson and teammates report that expectations formed of activity-based workplaces before move-in influence users actual experiences in these areas.  The researchers share that their goal was to “explore how implementing an activity-based work environment impacts employees’ workspace satisfaction (e.g. privacy, air quality, lighting, temperature, etc.). A sample . . . in a government organization implementing an activity-based working environment was investigated using a longitudinal design, with employees being surveyed thrice – once before and twice after implementation. The results indicate that when workspace satisfaction is impacted by implementing an activity-based work environment, this effect seems primarily based on employees’ prior attitude toward such work environments. . . . this study supports the importance of employees’ initial attitude toward an activity-based work environment concerning workspace satisfaction. This finding has practical implications for organizations and advances the understanding of why an activity-based work environment may positively affect workspace satisfaction for some employees while negatively affecting others.”

Freyr Halldorsson, Halldor Valgeirsson, and Kari Kristinsson. “The Predictive Power of Prior Attitudes: Understanding Employee Workspace Satisfaction in Activity-Based Work Environments.” Journal of Corporate Real Estate, in press, https://doi.org/10.1108/JCRE-09-2023-0038