Book Review: Communication Essentials for Financial Planners

Book Review: Communication Essentials for Financial Planner

The Benefit of Power Posing Before a High-Stakes Social Evaluation

The current experiment tested whether changing one‘s nonverbal behavior prior to a high-stakes social evaluation could improve performance in the evaluated task. Participants adopted expansive, open (high-power) poses, or contractive, closed (low-power) poses, and then prepared and delivered a speech to two evaluators as part of a mock job interview, a prototypical social evaluation. All speeches were videotaped and coded for overall performance and hireability, and the potential mediators of speech quality (e.g., content, structure) and presentation quality (e.g., captivating, confident). As predicted, high power posers performed better and were more likely to be chosen for hire, and this relationship was mediated only by presentation quality, not speech quality. Power pose condition had no effect on body posture during the social evaluation, thus highlighting the relationship between preparatory nonverbal behavior and subsequent performance

Lake Champlain Water Quality: A Study of Public Awareness, Perceptions, and Behavior

Introduction: Lake Champlain serves as a major source of drinking water and a prime recreational area in Vermont. The Vermont Department of Health actively monitors Lake Champlain water quality, generates informational resources, and issues restrictions and advisories as necessary. Key water quality issues include: blue-green algae blooms (BGAB), combined sewer overflow (CSO), mercury-based fish consumption advisories, and suitability for recreational use. Determining public awareness of Lake Champlain water quality, and how perceptions of Lake Champlain water quality influence behavior, are essential to improving communication with at-risk and underinformed populations.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1233/thumbnail.jp

The persuasive “power” of stigma

a b s t r a c t We predicted that able-bodied individuals and White Americans would have a difficult time saying no to persuasive appeals offered by disabled individuals and Black Americans, due to their desire to make such interactions proceed smoothly. In two experiments, we show that members of stigmatized groups have a peculiar kind of persuasive ''power'' in face-to-face interactions with non-stigmatized individuals. In Experiment 1, wheelchair-bound confederates were more effective in publicly soliciting donations to a range of charities than confederates seated in a regular chair. In Experiment 2, Whites changed their private attitudes more following face-to-face appeals from Black than White confederates, an effect mediated by their increased efforts to appear agreeable by nodding and expressing agreement. This difference was eliminated when impression management concerns were minimized -when participants viewed the appeals on video

Food Security in the COVID-19 Era

Food insecurity is a national issue, one that affected 10.5% of households during some point of the year 2019. Those affected by food insecurity can have their access to food jeopardized due to financial hardship, eating patterns altered to prolong the food available, or various other adjustments including reliance on low-cost food, skipping meals, etc. The state of Vermont is not immune to food insecurity, with a rate of 11.3% of households in 2018. The Covid-19 pandemic created an unprecedented shift in daily life, with households having to rapidly adapt to meet newly imposed governmental regulations, including stay at home orders, while maintaining access to food essentials. This changed exacerbated food insecurity in already food-insecure households, while simultaneously creating food insecurity for those previously unaffected. A study focusing on food insecurity in Vermont from March to April 2020 found a 32.3% increase in food insecurity, with 35.5% of food-insecure households being previously food-secure. This change highlighted not only the growing incidence of food insecurity, but also acknowledged the demographic change seen by newly food insecure households. While this increase is dramatic and alarming, to our knowledge there is no research looking at the continuation of these trends regarding the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on food insecurity in Vermont households. This lack of data indicates a need for continued follow up to best inform governmental agencies on both how Vermont households are being affected, and how regulations during summer & fall 2020 impacted the rise in food insecurity. These data will then provide guidance for future action to combat current and future food insecurity.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1304/thumbnail.jp

Exposing Racial Discrimination: Implicit & Explicit Measures–The My Body, My Story Study of 1005 US-Born Black & White Community Health Center Members

Background To date, research on racial discrimination and health typically has employed explicit self-report measures, despite their potentially being affected by what people are able and willing to say. We accordingly employed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) for racial discrimination, first developed and used in two recent published studies, and measured associations of the explicit and implicit discrimination measures with each other, socioeconomic and psychosocial variables, and smoking. Methodology/Principal Findings Among the 504 black and 501 white US-born participants, age 35–64, randomly recruited in 2008–2010 from 4 community health centers in Boston, MA, black participants were over 1.5 times more likely (p<0.05) to be worse off economically (e.g., for poverty and low education) and have higher social desirability scores (43.8 vs. 28.2); their explicit discrimination exposure was also 2.5 to 3.7 times higher (p<0.05) depending on the measure used, with over 60% reporting exposure in 3 or more domains and within the last year. Higher IAT scores for target vs. perpetrator of discrimination occurred for the black versus white participants: for “black person vs. white person”: 0.26 vs. 0.13; and for “me vs. them”: 0.24 vs. 0.19. In both groups, only low non-significant correlations existed between the implicit and explicit discrimination measures; social desirability was significantly associated with the explicit but not implicit measures. Although neither the explicit nor implicit discrimination measures were associated with odds of being a current smoker, the excess risk for black participants (controlling for age and gender) rose in models that also controlled for the racial discrimination and psychosocial variables; additional control for socioeconomic position sharply reduced and rendered the association null. Conclusions Implicit and explicit measures of racial discrimination are not equivalent and both warrant use in research on racial discrimination and health, along with data on socioeconomic position and social desirability

Varieties of export-oriented entrepreneurship in Asia

This paper explores differences in the proportion of export-oriented early-stage entrepreneurial activity in 12 Asian countries. Drawing on varieties of capitalism theory, we find that Asian countries with high quality institutions are more likely to have higher proportions of young export-oriented firms. However, analysis on a 51 country data set indicates that Asian countries have significantly fewer young export-oriented firms than do non-Asian countries. Furthermore, the multi-country study reveals that countries with higher proportions of export-oriented entrepreneurial activity tend to have flexible industrial relations, high quality vocational training, and confrontational labor-employer relations, however the proportion of export-oriented new ventures is not related to the quality of corporate governance and inter-firm relations

Power poses – where do we stand?

<p>Dynamic results for Scenario 2.</p

First Is Best

We experience the world serially rather than simultaneously. A century of research on human and nonhuman animals has suggested that the first experience in a series of two or more is cognitively privileged. We report three experiments designed to test the effect of first position on implicit preference and choice using targets that range from individual humans and social groups to consumer goods. Experiment 1 demonstrated an implicit preference to buy goods from the first salesperson encountered and to join teams encountered first, even when the difference in encounter is mere seconds. In Experiment 2 the first of two consumer items presented in quick succession was more likely to be chosen. In Experiment 3 an alternative hypothesis that first position merely accentuates the valence of options was ruled out by demonstrating that first position enhances preference for the first even when it is evaluatively negative in meaning (a criminal). Together, these experiments demonstrate a “first is best” effect and we offer possible interpretations based on evolutionary mechanisms of this “bound” on rational behavior and suggest that automaticity of judgment may be a helpful principle in clarifying previous inconsistencies in the empirical record on the effects of order on preference and choice