Harry Potter and Fanfiction: Filling in the Gaps

I examine one fanfiction story, The Way Back to Daylight by Kettle, and the way this story asks us to reinterpret the Harry Potter series using The Aeneid as an allusive intertext. Fanfiction is as any narrative that relies upon the essential elements of one author’s storyworld for the construction and intelligibility of a new storyworld. As readers, we are prompted to imagine the storyworld through cues in the text, in greater or lesser detail depending on the information provided. There are always gaps in the discourse—spaces that are not and cannot be fully determined by information in the text. These gaps offer a tantalizing opportunity for fanfiction to come in and re-negotiate the narrative, creating alternatives or extrapolations beyond the fiction as it is presented originally. By attempting to augment the narrative from which it derives through fictional gaps, skillful fanfiction asks the reader to re-read that source narrative—continuing the story beyond the last page. The interpretational issues I explore in The Way Back to Daylight are the fanfiction’s romantic reading of Remus and Sirius’ relationship, and its further re-negotiation of the laws surrounding death in the Harry Potter world using Aenus’ journey to the underworld in The Aeneid as a reference. Ultimately, The Way Back to Daylight presents a fantasy of resurrection that is impossible in Rowling’s world, allowing readers to write a happy ending for Remus and Sirius that never existed in the Harry Potter series. Even when the fanfiction’s interpretation is impossible in the original story, fanfiction is capable of changing its readers’ subsequent experiences of that original story. Studying fanfiction can help us understand the processes of intertextuality and transtextuality that underlie all fictional endeavors.No embarg

CONSUMER UNDERSTANDING AND USE OF HEALTH INFORMATION ON PRODUCT LABELS: MARKETING IMPLICATIONS FOR FUNCTIONAL FOOD

In recent years, the numbers of functional foods being developed and subjected to scientific evaluation have increased substantially. The main characteristic of functional foods that distinguishes them from conventional foods is the potential health benefit, which can be considered to be a credence attribute of product quality. Because this characteristic cannot be easily assessed even after consumption, an asymmetric information environment for health benefits has emerged where producers have more information than consumers. Thus the government intervenes by regulating the provision of health information on product labels in order to avoid potential market failures. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently amended the way health claims on labels of conventional food and dietary supplements are managed. The new policy on qualified health claims allows claims to be made based on different levels of supporting scientific evidence. The policy goal is to encourage firms to make accurate, science-based claims about the health benefits of their products while helping consumers prevent disease and improve their health through sound dietary decisions using nutrition information. This marks a break from the previous environment where a lengthy approval process was argued to provide a road block for food firms wanting to market functional foods based on emerging evidence of diet to health links. This study has two objectives. First, to determine how consumers use health and nutrition information on food labels to form judgments about product quality, using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) as a theoretical framework. Second, to examine whether consumers can differentiate various levels of health claims, specifically the new qualified language, approved by FDA in 2003. It is interesting to determine whether consumers understand the different levels of scientific evidence supporting such claims and whether they can distinguish between the disclaimer languages used. Understanding how consumers use health and nutrition information on product labels has implications for both public policy and food manufacturers who use health claims as tools to market their products e.g., functional foods. This study used a still hypothetical functional food product a wheat cracker containing soy protein. It has been shown that soluble fiber and isoflavones, which can be found in wheat and soy products, respectively, independently help prevent the risk of several maladies including cancer and heart disease. A 5 (claim information on the front label a control condition and the four levels of qualified health claim) x 2 (information on Nutrition Facts) between-subjects factorial design was applied. Five versions of claim information were manipulated, including a control condition and four levels of qualified health claim. Each claim contained explicit relationships between nutrients and diseases i.e., isoflavones - heart disease and soluble fiber - cancers, but had different disclaimers explaining the level of scientific evidence supporting the claim. A report card was also included to inform consumers about the various claim levels, ranging from level A to D. Information on the Nutrition Facts panel was manipulated representing a "healthy" and an "unhealthy" version. Three hundred and seventy-two undergraduate students participated in the study, receiving extra credit for a Marketing class. Several multi-item scales are used as dependent variables, including attitude toward the product, buying intention, strength of evaluation about scientific studies to support claim, confidence about claim statement, perception of product's health benefit, and information search. A univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) is conducted to test main and interaction effects among independent variables on a dependent variable. The results of this study suggest that consumers pay attention to information from all sources including the front label and Nutrition Facts panel. Even though it is shown that consumers react more positively to versions with health claims, there is no evidence to support the first hypothesis that consumers are more careful in evaluating product quality when health and nutrition information is present on the front package. Nevertheless, consumers are able to differentiate healthy products from unhealthy products, regardless of the presence of health and nutrition information on the front label. This study examines whether consumers understand and can distinguish various levels of qualified health claims. Although evidence suggests that consumers react differently to various claim levels, it is not clear whether people understand differences in the scientific support of these claims, as described in the disclaimer. Despite an increasing trend in attitude and purchase intention from the weakest claim (level D) to the strongest claim (level A), there is no statistically significant difference among claim levels when using measures of evaluation of strength of scientific studies, confidence about claim information, and perception of product's health benefit. From the public policy perspective, the results of this study can help determine how consumers evaluate health and nutrition information. It is shown that consumers do not overlook information from other parts of the label specifically the Nutrition Facts panel and that the presence of health and nutrition information on the front label is not likely to mislead consumers. The key issue here that needs further investigation is how to effectively provide information on the front label to consumers. FDA's goal is to permit the use of more, better, easily understood, and up-to-date scientific information about how dietary choices can affect consumers' health on food labels. It is important to identify optimal levels of qualified health claims, perhaps only two levels instead of four levels, so that consumers can distinguish and understand differences in terms of the scientific support for the claims and product benefits. As for the food industry, the results of this study can help food manufacturers decide what level of health and nutrition information they should provide to consumers. In addition to understanding the petitioning procedures for different claims, food firms must determine which, how, and when consumers understand and use health information in order to find the most efficient marketing communication channels.Health Economics and Policy,

Um olhar qualitativo sobre os blogs de moda

O desenvolvimento da tecnologia proporcionou grandes avanços à comunicação e suas mais variadas ferramentas de difusão. A Internet surgiu a partir deste progresso possibilitando uma comunicação globalizada que, por sua vez, originou novos meios de exposição de conhecimento, informação e interações, como, por exemplo, os sites de compra, as redes sociais e os blogs. O estudo aqui apresentado, de caráter exploratório, objetivou explicitar como os blogs de moda se constituem uma ferramenta eficaz de comunicação para o marketing. O desenvolvimento da pesquisa ocorreu a partir das perspectivas das ‘blogueiras’ de moda e dos leitores de blogs de moda, por meio de entrevistas semiestruturadas. Os resultados sugerem que estes blogs são considerados fontes de informação confiáveis, atualizadas e, sobretudo, que oferecem certa intimidade entre os públicos envolvidos, o que aumenta a atitude positiva dos consumidores para com o canal, para produtos e marcas e para se envolverem em comentários boca-a-boca. 

Changing prejudiced attitudes by thinking about persuasive messages: implications for resistance

This research showed that changing attitudes toward stigmatized groups can result from both the simple processes that require little thinking and the traditional elaborative forms of persuasion that require high thinking processes. Importantly, evenwhen the obtained attitude change was equivalent for situations in which there washigh and low message elaboration, the changes produced in high thinking conditions were found to be more resistant to further attacks than equivalent changes produced by less thought ful mechanisms. Not only were those attitudes more resistantas measured objectively (Study 1) but participants also perceived their attitudes to be subjectively more resistant (Study 2). These studies suggest that examining the processes by which prejudice is changed can be important for understanding the consequences and long-term implications of treatments and campaigns oriented to changing attitudes toward stigmatized groups.This research was supported in part by the Spanish grant Nº. PSI2011-26212 from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion

Validation of the test need for cognition: a study in behavioral accounting

This study aimed to validate the Need for Cognition scale (NFC) in behavioral accounting. In addition, we sought to measure the possible correlations between the level of need for cognition and the existence of cognitive biases in decisions in accounting and financial information. Two validations were performed to carry out the process of full validation – criterion and construct. The analysis was done by the examination of a sample comprised by 128 graduation students. The statistical technique used for the validation of this test was a factorial analysis for it has the ability to determine the degree of influence of a particular variable in the explanation of a factor, and the processing logistic regression was used for the explanation of possible values as a function of known values or independent variables. The results of the construct of validity showed the legitimacy of the NFC as a unidimensional scale excluding three outputs of its original scale, since the criterion validity of the results confirmed the impact of the level of cognition in maximizing the occurrence of heuristics in managerial decisions

Dunning–Kruger effects in face perception

The Dunning–Kruger Effect refers to a common failure of metacognitive insight in which people who are incompetent in a given domain are unaware of their incompetence. This effect has been found in a wide range of tasks, raising the question of whether there is any ‘special’ domain in which it is not found. One plausible candidate is face perception, which has sometimes been thought to be ‘special’. To test this possibility, we assessed participants' insight into their own face perception abilities (self-estimates) and those of other people (peer estimates). We found classic Dunning–Kruger Effects in matching tasks for unfamiliar identity, familiar identity, gaze direction, and emotional expression. Low performers overestimated themselves, and high performers underestimated themselves. Interestingly, participants' self-estimates were more stable across tasks than their actual performance. In addition, peer estimates revealed a consistent egocentric bias. High performers attributed higher accuracy to other people than did low performers. We conclude that metacognitive insight into face perception abilities is limited and subject to systematic biases. Our findings urge caution when interpreting self-report measures of face perception ability. They also reveal a fundamental source of uncertainty in social interactions

Formation, representation, and activation of contextualized attitudes

The pervasiveness of context effects on evaluative responses has led to conflicting views as to whether evaluations reflect stable attitudinal representations that are directly retrieved from memory or online constructions on the basis of momentarily accessible attributes. The current research expands on this debate by investigating the formation, representation, and activation of contextualized attitudes, with a particular focus on the role of incidental visual cues of the environmental context. Five experiments demonstrated that (1) incidental visual cues tend to be integrated into the representation of attitude-incongruent, but not attitude-congruent, information; (2) these cues are not directly associated with the valence of counterattitudinal experiences, but instead constrain the activation of available information about the attitude object; (3) the modulating function of these cues remains intact even when they become directly associated with an evaluative response; (4) contextualized representations of counterattitudinal information can be activated by contexts that are either perceptually or conceptually similar to the context in which the counterattitudinal experience took place. Implications for context effects and attitude change are discussed

Who stays proactive after entrepreneurship training? Need for cognition, personal initiative maintenance, and well-being

Personal initiative training is a promising way to increase entrepreneurial personal initiative, which is a key behavior for successful entrepreneurship. Although personal initiative training has been shown to promote personal initiative, little is known about how this proactive behavior can be maintained over time and what the consequences are. The training transfer literature suggests that training effects usually decline with time. It is not clear, however, which factors contribute to personal initiative maintenance and which benefits go along with it. In a randomized controlled field experiment with 912 microentrepreneurs in Lomé, Togo, we investigate the influence of need for cognition—a cognitive factor driving proactive behavior—on personal initiative maintenance after training. In addition, we examine the effect of need for cognition on the well‐being consequences of personal initiative maintenance. We show that people high in need for cognition tend to maintain posttraining personal initiative longer than those low in need for cognition. However, contrary to our predictions, need for cognition has no effect on the level of well‐being that results from personal initiative maintenance. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of personal initiative and its maintenance and could be used to increase training effectiveness