Mental Representations of Weekdays

Keeping social appointments involves keeping track of what day it is. In practice, mismatches between apparent day and actual day are common. For example, a person might think the current day is Wednesday when in fact it is Thursday. Here we show that such mismatches are highly systematic, and can be traced to specific properties of their mental representations. In Study 1, mismatches between apparent day and actual day occurred more frequently on midweek days (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) than on other days, and were mainly due to intrusions from immediately neighboring days. In Study 2, reaction times to report the current day were fastest on Monday and Friday, and slowest midweek. In Study 3, participants generated fewer semantic associations for "Tuesday", "Wednesday" and "Thursday" than for other weekday names. Similarly, Google searches found fewer occurrences of midweek days in webpages and books. Analysis of affective norms revealed that participants' associations were strongly negative for Monday, strongly positive for Friday, and graded over the intervening days. Midweek days are confusable because their mental representations are sparse and similar. Mondays and Fridays are less confusable because their mental representations are rich and distinctive, forming two extremes along a continuum of change

Factors affecting the extent of monday blues: Evidence from a meta-analysis

A meta-analysis of 34 samples identified a small but reliable "Monday blues" effect (-.08 ≤ d ≤-.06) in samples reporting current or real-time moods for each day of the week. However, the size of the effect in samples reporting recalled summaries of moods experienced over the course of a day varied depending on whether the sample involved university students or nonstudents. University students reporting recalled summaries of daily moods showed a large Monday blues effect (d =-.25), whereas married men who were not students reported smaller effects with greater variance (-.19 ≤ d ≤ -.01). The 34 samples reporting recalled summaries of moods experienced over multiple days produced effects ranging from -.25 to -1.28, but the variance among these samples was too great to estimate an aggregate d statistic. © Psychological Reports 2011

Olfaction and the retail environment: examining the influence of ambient scent

Smell, Scent, Retail brand image, Retail environment, Human olfaction,