Botner, Mishra, and Mishra link various types of sounds, when used in names, to perception of risk. The team found that “For decisions involving greater risk and reward for the consumer, marketing decision- makers may benefit from using more volatile names. That is, a risky financial portfolio targeting adventurous investors that seek high risk and reward could use a volatile name.
As gift giving season approaches, it’s useful to keep top-of-mind the findings of a Rixom-lead team and interesting to consider how their work might be applied in other contexts. The researchers report that “when recipients open a gift from a friend, they like it less when the giver has wrapped it neatly as opposed to sloppily. . .
Stancato and Keltner have identified additional implications of feeling awed. They share that “Guided by prior work documenting that awe promotes humility, increases perceptions of uncertainty, and diminishes personal concerns . . . we tested the hypothesis that awe results in reduced conviction about one’s ideological attitudes. . . . participants induced to experience awe, relative to those feeling amusement or in a neutral control condition, expressed less conviction regarding their attitudes toward capital punishment. . . .
Park and Hadi evaluated links between cool temperatures and perceptions of luxury. They determined that “physical cold can indeed increase consumers’ perceptions of a product's status signaling and luxuriousness.
Gabriel and Montenegro confirm that the design of the spaces where animals are exhibited influences the opinions zoo-goers form of those animals. The researchers had people view “animals in wild, naturalistic, front cage bar, or back cage bar settings with a name-only control. . . . Perceptions of docility increased and vigor decreased as the naturalness of the environment declined.”
Arnal and teammates probed what sorts of sounds alarm humans. They found that “One strategy, exploited by alarm signals, consists in emitting fast but perceptible amplitude modulations in the roughness range (30–150 Hz). . . . Rough sounds synchronise activity throughout superior temporal regions, subcortical and cortical limbic areas, and the frontal cortex, a network classically involved in aversion processing.” Rough sounds from 40-80 Hz are especially unpleasant for us to hear. The 40-80 Hz range is where the frequencies of babies crying, human screams, and many alarms are found.
Tezer and Bodur evaluated the effects of environmentally responsible situations on how people feel. They determined that their “research explores how using a green product (e.g., a pair of headphones made from recycled materials) influences the enjoyment of the accompanying consumption experience (e.g., listening to music), even if consumers have not deliberately chosen or purchased the product. Five experiments in actual consumption settings revealed that using a green (vs.
De Bellis and colleagues investigated product customization. They report that “Mass customization interfaces typically guide consumers through the configuration process in a sequential manner, focusing on one product attribute after the other. . . . A series of large-scale field and experimental studies, conducted with Western and Eastern consumers, shows that matching the interface to consumers’ culture-specific processing style enhances the effectiveness of mass customization.
Keijzer and colleagues set out to confirm the health benefits of living near greenspaces. They determined that “More residential surrounding greenspace was associated with lower risk of metabolic syndrome. . . . Metabolic syndrome is an important risk factor for non-communicable diseases, particularly type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, and stroke. . . . The present longitudinal study was based on data from four clinical examinations between 1997 and 2013 in 6076 participants of the Whitehall II study, UK (aged 45–69 years at baseline).
Moran determined that nature experiences, “real” or via images, have a restorative effect on people in prison, they seem to reduce their mental fatigue. She reports “results of a survey of prisoners at a large medium-security prison for men in the United Kingdom. It reflects on prisoners' experiences in relation to elements of the environment in which they reside; specifically, outdoor green spaces and green views in the form of whole-wall photographic images of the natural environment.
