How Do Emotions Influence Saving Behavior

Employers have moved away from traditional defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s. As a result, many individuals are now required to make their own retirement saving and investment decisions, which has raised concerns about their ability and desire to handle these decisions. Since investment choices have major implications for future financial welfare, it is important to understand how individuals make these decisions and to identify potential ways to improve the decision-making process. Researchers have explored various factors affecting retirement saving, such as income, age, job tenure, self-control failure, financial literacy and trust. No prior research, however, has looked at the effects of emotions on retirement savings. This Issue in Brief examines how two different emotions – hope and hopefulness – affect 401(k) participation and asset allocation. The first section defines the terms. The second section describes the structure of a recent field experiment. The third section summarizes the results, which reveal that having high hope (i.e. yearning) – for a secure retirement leads to different investment behaviors than having high hopefulness (i.e. perceived likelihood). Furthermore, threats to hope and threats to hopefulness are found to have different effects on 401(k) participation and investment decisions. The final section concludes.

Exploring the superadditive effects of scent and pictures on verbal recall: An extension of dual coding theory

This research extends the dual coding theory of memory retrieval (Paivio 1969, 2007) beyond its traditional focus on verbal and pictorial information to olfactory information. We manipulate the presence or absence of olfactory and pictorial stimuli at the time of encoding (study 1) or retrieval (study 2) and measure the impact on verbal recall. After a time delay, scent enhances recall of verbal information, and scent‐based retrieval cues potentiate the facilitative effect of pictures on recall. These results cannot be attributed merely to increased elaboration at the time of exposure.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141219/1/jcpy317.pd

Is scent‐enhanced memory immune to retroactive interference?

Research shows that scent enhances memory for associated information. Current debate centers around scent’s immunity to “retroactive interference,” i.e., reduced memory for earlier‐learned information after exposure to additional, subsequently‐learned information. This paper demonstrates that scent‐enhanced memory is indeed prone to retroactive interference, but that some of the information lost is restored using a scent‐based retrieval cue. Two process explanations for interference effects are proposed, with the evidence providing more support for an inhibition rather than a response competition explanation. The results enhance our understanding of the encoding and retrieval of olfactory information from long‐term memory, and reasons why interference occurs.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141656/1/jcpy354.pd

Differentiating the Psychological Impact of Threats to Hope and Hopefulness

Recent work identifies hope as an under-explored though potentially important emotion and suggests that hope can be differentiated from an often confused construct-hopefulness. A field experiment involving 272 real world consumers investigated the effects of both hope and hopefulness on consumers' decisions and actions related to retirement investing. The results show that hope and hopefulness are two distinct emotions and have very different effects on consumers' information search, risk perceptions, and choice outcomes in retirement investment decisions, with hopefulness impacting the likelihood that consumers would invest in a 401k retirement plan and hope impacting the extent of their information search and risky decision making

A Social Approach to Voter Vengeance

We propose that, in electoral contexts, voters may experience a desire for vengeance, i.e., to "get even" with an entity, such as a political candidate, in response to a perceived wrongdoing. We draw on research from psychology and sociology to develop a theoretical framework for examining factors that may influence the extent to which voters exact revenge on political candidates with their voting behavior. Our experiments show that voters exact revenge on a perpetrator candidate. This process is mediated by damage to self-identity. We also show how making salient a shared affiliation with the perpetrator candidate can attenuate vengeful behavior

The impact of ambient scent on evaluation, attention, and memory for familiar and unfamiliar brands

Subjects were exposed to familiar and unfamiliar brand names in either consumer behavior, especially when compared with the amount of research devoted to other senses, such as vision and hearing a pleasantly scented or unscented environment. A computer recorded how much time they took to evaluate each brand. After a distracter task, thei

Improving the Crystal Ball: Consumer Consensus and Retail Prediction Markets

Retail buyers\u27 forecasts, decisions, and subsequent purchases result in billions of dollars of merchandise being purchased and offered for sale by retailers around the world. However, academic research examining this decision process has been limited, and recommendations for improvement almost nonexistent. In the present study, we begin to address this issue by introducing a new approach that compares retail buyers\u27 consensus forecasts with those from a sample of “ordinary” consumers. The potential for incorporating forecasts from ordinary consumers suggests an opportunity to create what are termed retail prediction markets, which offer significant potential to improve the accuracy of buyers’ forecasts. We conclude with limitations and areas for future research

The Library Ireland Week (LIW) job swop initiative Experiences from Maynooth University Library

Each year, as part of Library Ireland Week (LIW), Irish libraries are encouraged to engage in job swops. This initiative, championed by the Library Association of Ireland (LAI) (https://libraryassociation.ie/) is straightforward, with individual libraries organising swops and absorbing any costs involved. This article describes the experiences of six library assistants from Maynooth University (MU) (https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/library) Ireland, who participated in job swop

Mapping Attitude Formation as a Function of Information Input: Online Processing Models of Attitude Formation

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141742/1/jcpy21.pd

Does Touch Affect Taste? The Perceptual Transfer of Product Container Haptic Cues

We develop a conceptual framework regarding the perceptual transfer of haptic or touch-related characteristics from product containers to judgments of the products themselves. Thus, the firmness of a cup in which water is served may affect consumers' judgments of the water itself. This framework predicts that not all consumers are equally affected by such nondiagnostic haptic cues. Results from four studies show that consumers high in the autotelic need for touch (general liking for haptic input) are less affected by such nondiagnostic haptic cues compared to consumers low in the autotelic need for touch. The research has many implications for product and package design. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..