Brand Suicide? Memory and Liking of Negative Brand Names

Negative brand names are surprisingly common in the marketplace (e.g., Poison perfume; Hell pizza, and Monster energy drink), yet their effects on consumer behavior are currently unknown. Three studies investigated the effects of negative brand name valence on brand name memory and liking of a branded product. Study 1 demonstrates that relative to nonnegative brand names, negative brand names and their associated logos are better recognised. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrate that negative valence of a brand name tends to have a detrimental influence on product evaluation with evaluations worsening as negative valence increases. However, evaluation is also dependent on brand name arousal, with high arousal brand names resulting in more positive evaluations, such that moderately negative brand names are equally as attractive as some non-negative brand names. Study 3 shows evidence for affective habituation, whereby the effects of negative valence reduce with repeated exposures to some classes of negative brand name

Cervical epidural steroid injections in the management of cervical radiculitis: interlaminar versus transforaminal. A review

There has been recent concern regarding the safety of cervical epidural steroid injections. The decision to proceed with treatment requires balancing the risk and benefits. This article is an in depth review of the efficacy, complications, and technique of both interlaminar and transforaminal cervical epidural steroid injections in the management of cervical radiculitis

Stimulus competition in pre/post and online ratings in an evaluative learning design

Evaluative learning is said to differ from Pavlovian associative learning in that it reflects stimulus contiguity, not contingency. Thus, evaluative learning should not be subject to stimulus competition, a proposal tested in the current experiments. Participants were presented in elemental and compound training phases with pictures of shapes as CSs. Each shape/pair of shapes was followed by a picture of a happy or an angry face as the US. In Experiments 1 and 2, evaluative ratings were collected before and after the experiment, and, in Experiment 3, participants provided evaluations online. Stimulus competition was evident in all experiments confirming that evaluative learning is sensitive to stimulus contingencies. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Does affective learning exist in the absence of contingency awareness?

The proposal that affective learning, the learning of likes and dislikes, can exist in the absence of contingency awareness, whereas signal learning, the learning of stimulus relationships, cannot, was investigated in a differential conditioning paradigm that was embedded in a visual masking task. Startle magnitude modulation and changes in verbal ratings served as measures of affective learning, whereas skin conductance was taken to reflect signal learning. Awareness was assessed online with an expectancy dial and in a postexperimental questionnaire. Both between-subject comparisons of verbalizers and nonverbalizers and within-subject comparisons of verbalizers before and after verbalization failed to reveal any evidence for learning, whether affective or otherwise, in the absence of knowledge of the stimulus contingencies. (C) 2001 Academic Press

Startle blink facilitation during the go signal of a reaction time task is not affected by movement preparation or attention to the go signal

Startle reflex eliciting stimuli presented at the onset of the go signal in a simple forewarned reaction time (RT) task (at a SOA of 0 ms) elicit larger blink reflexes than do stimuli presented later (e.g., at a SOA of 150 ms) or during inter trial intervals. The present study investigated whether this facilitation is affected by attention to the go signal or motor preparation. Participants performed a forewarned reaction time task that crossed the requirements for a speeded response (Hold versus Move) and for a discrimination task performed with the go signal (Report versus No report). Relative to control reflexes, blinks elicited at a SOA of 0 ms were facilitated and blinks elicited at a SOA of 150 ms were inhibited. RTs were slower on trials that required attention to the go signal and in both attention conditions and at both SOAs shortened in the presence of a blink-eliciting stimulus. However, neither attention to the go signal nor motor preparation affected blink facilitation at the 0 ms SOA. This finding suggests that the blink reflex facilitation observed at a SOA of 0 ms with the onset of a go signal reflects on the summation of sub- and supra-threshold activations of the startle pathway. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

Attentional blink startle modulation during pleasant and unpleasant cues in human affective conditioning

Affect modulates the startle blink reflex in a linear fashion in the picture-viewing paradigm. However, the process responsible for reflex modulation during conditional stimuli (CSs) that have acquired valence through affective conditioning remains unclear. Experiments 1 – 3 conditioned positive and negative valence to neutral stimuli (CSs) using the picture-picture paradigm. Pleasantness ratings and affective priming were used as indices of CS valence changes. Startle modulation was assessed throughout an extinction phase: acoustic startle-eliciting probes were presented at long lead intervals during CSs and during inter-trial intervals. Experiment 1 used a between-group design to condition positive and negative valence separately in a differential conditioning procedure. Experiment 2 and 3 employed pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral USs within a single procedure. In Experiment 2 picture pairs were presented in a standard forward conditioning(CS-US) manner, whereas in Experiment 3 the stimuli were presented in a backward conditioning (US-CS) manner to control for a potential effect of anticipatory arousal on startle modulation. Affective learning as indexed by ratings and/or affective priming was evident in all experiments. Blink startle was larger during CSs that had been paired with valenced USs than during the neutral CS. This result emerged regardless of US valence or of the conditioning procedure. Taken together, the data strongly support an attentional modulation account of startle reflex modulation during human affective conditioning

The relationship between self-reported animal fear and ERP modulation: Evidence for enhanced processing and fear of harmless invertebrates in snake- and spider-fearful individuals

The present study used ERPs to compare processing of fear-relevant (FR) animals (snakes and spiders) and non-fear-relevant (NFR) animals similar in appearance (worms and beetles). EEG was recorded from 18 undergraduate participants (10 females) as they completed two animal-viewing tasks that required simple categorization decisions. Participants were divided on a post hoc basis into low snake/spider fear and high snake/spider fear groups. Overall, FR animals were rated higher on fear and elicited a larger LPC. However, individual differences qualified these effects. Participants in the low fear group showed clear differentiation between FR and NFR animals on subjective ratings of fear and LPC modulation. In contrast, participants in the high fear group did not show such differentiation between FR and NFR animals. These findings suggest that the salience of feared-FR animals may generalize on both a behavioural and electro-cortical level to other animals of similar appearance but of a non-harmful nature