Customer emotions in service failure and recovery encounters

Emotions play a significant role in the workplace, and considerable attention has been given to the study of employee emotions. Customers also play a central function in organizations, but much less is known about customer emotions. This chapter reviews the growing literature on customer emotions in employee–customer interfaces with a focus on service failure and recovery encounters, where emotions are heightened. It highlights emerging themes and key findings, addresses the measurement, modeling, and management of customer emotions, and identifies future research streams. Attention is given to emotional contagion, relationships between affective and cognitive processes, customer anger, customer rage, and individual differences

Getting back to the rough ground: deception and ‘social living’

At the heart of the social intelligence hypothesis is the central role of ‘social living’. But living is messy and psychologists generally seek to avoid this mess in the interests of getting clean data and cleaner logical explanations. The study of deception as intelligent action is a good example of the dangers of such avoidance. We still do not have a full picture of the development of deceptive actions in human infants and toddlers or an explanation of why it emerges. This paper applies Byrne & Whiten's functional taxonomy of tactical deception to the social behaviour of human infants and toddlers using data from three previous studies. The data include a variety of acts, such as teasing, pretending, distracting and concealing, which are not typically considered in relation to human deception. This functional analysis shows the onset of non-verbal deceptive acts to be surprisingly early. Infants and toddlers seem to be able to communicate false information (about themselves, about shared meanings and about events) as early as true information. It is argued that the development of deception must be a fundamentally social and communicative process and that if we are to understand why deception emerges at all, the scientist needs to get ‘back to the rough ground’ as Wittgenstein called it and explore the messy social lives in which it develops

Secondary structure simulations of twin-arginine signal peptides in different environments

The twin-arginine translocation (Tat) system transports folded proteins across bacterial plasma membranes and the chloroplast thylakoid membrane. A twin-arginine motif in the signal peptide sequence plays a key role in the signal process. In this article we report the results of molecular dynamics simulations on a typical Escherichia coli RR-signal peptide and two mutant variants in both aqueous and trifluoroethanol (TFE) solutions. It has been found that the peptide switches between two distinct states: random coil in water and some helical content in TFE. Our simulations demonstrate that the wild-type peptide is considerably more flexible than either of the mutants in both the solvents investigated. The twin-arginine motif was found to provide a nucleation point for the formation of an -helix in water, but also appears to destabilise -helices in other regions of the peptide when dissolved in TFE