Brand mimicry of luxury brands

This research extends the theory of mimicry from the discipline of biological and natural sciences to the luxury brand context. Three brand mimicry scales namely Wicklerian-Eisnerian, Vavilovian and Pouyannian mimicry were developed and validated. A conceptual model is developed to test the influences of the three types of brand mimicry across four categories of luxury products. The findings provide academics, practitioners and policy makers with valuable insights into mimicry in the luxury brand industry

Relativity in social cognition: basic processes and novel applications of social comparisons

A key challenge for social psychology is to identify unifying principles that account for the complex dynamics of social behaviour. We propose psychological relativity and its core mechanism of comparison as one such unifying principle. Social cognition is relative in that it is shaped by comparative thinking. If comparative thinking is indeed a central mechanism in social psychology, then it should be affected by, and affect itself, a wide variety of phenomena. To support our proposal, we review recent evidence investigating basic processes underlying and novel applications of social comparisons. Specifically, we clarify determinants of assimilation and contrast, evaluative consequences of comparing similarities vs. differences, attitudinal effects of spatial relativity, and how spatial arrangements determine perceived similarity, one of the antecedents of social comparisons. We then move to behavioural relativity effects on motivation and self-regulation, as well as imitation behaviour. Finally, we address relativity within the more applied areas of morality and political psychology. The reviewed research thereby illustrates how unifying principles of social cognition may be instrumental in answering old questions and discovering new phenomena and explanations

Computational and Psycho-Physiological Investigations of Musical Emotions

The ability of music to stir human emotions is a well known fact (Gabrielsson & Lindstrom. 2001). However, the manner in which music contributes to those experiences remains obscured. One of the main reasons is the large number of syndromes that characterise emotional experiences. Another is their subjective nature: musical emotions can be affected by memories, individual preferences and attitudes, among other factors (Scherer & Zentner, 2001). But can the same music induce similar affective experiences in all listeners, somehow independently of acculturation or personal bias? A considerable corpus of literature has consistently reported that listeners agree rather strongly about what type of emotion is expressed in a particular piece or even in particular moments or sections (Juslin & Sloboda, 2001). Those studies suggest that music features encode important characteristics of affective experiences, by suggesting the influence of various structural factors of music on emotional expression. Unfortunately, the nature of these relationships is complex, and it is common to find rather vague and contradictory descriptions. This thesis presents a novel methodology to analyse the dynamics of emotional responses to music. It consists of a computational investigation, based on spatiotemporal neural networks sensitive to structural aspects of music, which "mimic" human affective responses to music and permit to predict new ones. The dynamics of emotional responses to music are investigated as computational representations of perceptual processes (psychoacoustic features) and self-perception of physiological activation (peripheral feedback). Modelling and experimental results provide evidence suggesting that spatiotemporal patterns of sound resonate with affective features underlying judgements of subjective feelings. A significant part of the listener's affective response is predicted from the a set of six psychoacoustic features of sound - tempo, loudness, multiplicity (texture), power spectrum centroid (mean pitch), sharpness (timbre) and mean STFT flux (pitch variation) - and one physiological variable - heart rate. This work contributes to new evidence and insights to the study of musical emotions, with particular relevance to the music perception and emotion research communities

Humanist Narratology and the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy

What is a “humanistic drama”? Although we might describe narrative works as humanist, and references to the humanistic drama abound across a breadth of critical media, including film and literary theory, the parameters of these terms remain elliptical. My work attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism. In particular, humanists ask how we use narrative texts to complicate our understanding of others, and question the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction. After historicising narrative humanism and situating it among related philosophies, I develop humanist hermeneutics as a method for reading fictive texts, and provide examples of such readings. I integrate literary Darwinism, anthropology, cognitive science and social psychology into a social narratology, which catalogues the social functions of narrative. This expansive study asks how we can unite the descriptive capabilities of social science with the more prescriptive ethical inquiry of traditional humanism, and aims to demonstrate their productive compatibility. From this groundwork, I then look at a cluster of humanistic film texts: the suburban ensemble dramedy, a phenomenon in millennial American cinema politicising the quotidian and the domestic. Popular works include The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children, Junebug, The Oranges, and what is arguably the inciting feature in a wave of such films entering production, American Beauty. I provide examples of humanist readings of these films at two levels: an overview of genre development as social phenomenon (including histories of suburban depiction onscreen, ensemble cinema and affective experimentation in recent American filmmaking), followed by a close reading of a progenitor text, Ron Howard's 1989 film Parenthood

Modelling religious signalling

The origins of human social cooperation confound simple evolutionary explanation. But from Darwin and Durkheim onwards, theorists (anthropologists and sociologists especially) have posited a potential link with another curious and distinctively human social trait that cries out for explanation: religion. This dissertation explores one contemporary theory of the co-evolution of religion and human social cooperation: the signalling theory of religion, or religious signalling theory (RST). According to the signalling theory, participation in social religion (and its associated rituals and sanctions) acts as an honest signal of one's commitment to a religiously demarcated community and its way of doing things. This signal would allow prosocial individuals to positively assort with one another for mutual advantage, to the exclusion of more exploitative individuals. In effect, the theory offers a way that religion and cooperation might explain one another, but which that stays within an individualist adaptive paradigm. My approach is not to assess the empirical adequacy of the religious signalling explanation or contrast it with other explanations, but rather to deal with the theory in its own terms - isolating and fleshing out its core commitments, explanatory potential, and limitations. The key to this is acknowledging the internal complexities of signalling theory, with respect to the available models of honest signalling and the extent of their fit (or otherwise) with religion as a target system. The method is to take seriously the findings of formal modelling in animal signalling and other disciplines, and to apply these (and methods from the philosophy of biology more generally) to progressively build up a comprehensive picture of the theory, its inherent strengths and weaknesses. The first two chapters outline the dual explanatory problems that cooperation and religion present for evolutionary human science, and surveys contemporary approaches toward explaining them. Chapter three articulates an evolutionary conception of the signalling theory, and chapters four to six make the case for a series of requirements, limitations, and principles of application. Chapters seven and eight argue for the value of formal modelling to further flesh out the theory's commitments and potential and describe some simple simulation results which make progress in this regard. Though the inquiry often problematizes the signalling theory, it also shows that it should not be dismissed outright, and that it makes predictions which are apt for empirical testing