Emotions in business-to-business service relationships

Emotion in business-to-business service relationships regarding cargo services is explored. The service relationship is characterised by mutual trust and cooperation. Contact is mainly via telephone or e-mail with some face-to-face interactions and participants providing a complex, multi-skilled seamless service. Experience rather than training plays a vital role with long-term service relationships built up and maintained. Emotional sensitivity is acquired partly by experience and a repeat customer base but mainly through a genuine desire to help and get to know others. In contrast to the view of emotional labour bringing managerial control or adverse affects to service staff, the emotion engendered by this work is authentic expression bringing personal satisfaction

Empathic Responses Are Reduced to Competitive but Not Non-Competitive Outgroups

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordIndividuals feel more empathy for those in their group (i.e. ingroup members) than those who are not (i.e. outgroup members). But empathy is not merely selective to group distinctions, rather it fluctuates according to how groups are perceived. The goal of this research was to determine whether group-based evaluations can drive biases in self-reported empathy as well as in the underlying neural activity. Participants were asked to rate a target’s physical pain while BOLD responses were recorded via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The target was either a member of the ingroup or one of two outgroups, one which was more of a rival to the ingroup than the other. Participants reported more empathy for targets experiencing painful compared to innocuous events showing bias only in favour of their ingroup. Neural responses were stronger while observing painful, compared to innocuous, events but only for targets from the ingroup or the less competitive outgroup. The difference was non-significant and trended in the opposite direction when the target was from the more competitive outgroup. This provides evidence that empathy is not merely selective to “us” vs “them” but is more nuanced by whom we refer to by “them”.This work was supported by the Defence Science Technology Labs under Grant DSTLX-1000083201Defence Science and Technology Laboratory [DSTLX-1000083201]

A preliminary investigation of materialism and impulsiveness as predictors of technological addictions among young adults

Background and aims: The primary objective of the present research is to investigate the drivers of technological addiction in college students — heavy users of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The study places cell phone and instant messaging addiction in the broader context of consumption pathologies, investigating the influence of materialism and impulsiveness on these two technologies. Clearly, cell phones serve more than just a utilitarian purpose. Cell phones are used in public and play a vital role in the lives of young adults. The accessibility of new technologies, like cell phones, which have the advantages of portability and an ever increasing array of functions, makes their over-use increasingly likely. Methods: College undergraduates (N = 191) from two U.S. universities completed a paper and pencil survey instrument during class. The questionnaire took approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and contained scales that measured materialism, impulsiveness, and mobile phone and instant messaging addiction. Results: Factor analysis supported the discriminant validity of Ehrenberg, Juckes, White and Walsh's (2008) Mobile Phone and Instant Messaging Addictive Tendencies Scale. The path model indicates that both materialism and impulsiveness impact the two addictive tendencies, and that materialism's direct impact on these addictions has a noticeably larger effect on cell phone use than instant messaging. Conclusions: The present study finds that materialism and impulsiveness drive both a dependence on cell phones and instant messaging. As Griffiths (2012) rightly warns, however, researchers must be aware that one's addiction may not simply be to the cell phone, but to a particular activity or function of the cell phone. The emergence of multi-function smart phones requires that research must dig beneath the technology being used to the activities that draw the user to the particular technology

The role of emotions on consumers’ satisfaction within the fitness context

Previous studies have suggested that consumption-related emotions are important to understand post-purchase reactions. This study examines the relationship between fitness consumers’ emotions and overall satisfaction. After an initial step of free-thought listing and content validity, followed by a pre-test, a survey was conducted among consumers of five different fitness centers (n=786). The questionnaire included measures to assess positive and negative emotions, as well as overall satisfaction with the fitness center. The results gathered through a structural equation model provide evidence that negative emotion experienced by consumers impacts negatively overall satisfaction, while positive emotion have a positive effect on overall satisfaction. These findings suggest managerial implications, such as the need to collect consumers’ perceptions of both tangible and intangible aspects of the services, listen costumers’ opinions in a regular basis, and provide regular training to staff members, in order to identify the triggers of positive emotions and contribute to increased levels of overall satisfaction. Guidelines for future research within the fitness context are also suggested.Estudos precedentes sugerem que as emoções relacionadas com o consumo são importantes para compreender as reações dos consumidores após a compra. Este estudo analisa a relação entre as emoções dos consumidores de fitness e satisfação global. Depois de uma etapa inicial de listagem de pensamento-livre e validade de conteúdo, seguido de um pré-teste, foi realizada uma pesquisa entre os consumidores de cinco centros de fitness diferentes (n = 786). O questionário incluiu medidas para avaliar as emoções positivas e negativas, bem como a satisfação global com o centro de fitness. Os resultados obtidos através de um modelo de equações estruturais forneceram evidências de que as emoções negativas vivenciadas pelos consumidores impactam negativamente a satisfação global, enquanto as emoções positivas têm um efeito positivo sobre a satisfação global. Estes resultados sugerem implicações para os gestores, tais como a necessidade de recolher informação sobre a perceção dos consumidores dos aspetos tangíveis e intangíveis dos serviços, ouvir regularmente as opiniões dos consumidores e facultar formação regular aos colaboradores. Isto permitirá identificar os aspetos que desencadeiam emoções positivas e contribuir para o aumento dos níveis de satisfação global. Orientações para futuras pesquisas no contexto de fitness também são sugeridas.Sin financiación0.185 SJR (2015) Q3, 1090/1779 Medicine (miscellaneous); Q4, 177/229 Health (social science), 112/128 Sports scienceUE

The Intentional Use of Service Recovery Strategies to Influence Consumer Emotion, Cognition and Behaviour

Service recovery strategies have been identified as a critical factor in the success of. service organizations. This study develops a conceptual frame work to investigate how specific service recovery strategies influence the emotional, cognitive and negative behavioural responses of . consumers., as well as how emotion and cognition influence negative behavior. Understanding the impact of specific service recovery strategies will allow service providers' to more deliberately and intentionally engage in strategies that result in positive organizational outcomes. This study was conducted using a 2 x 2 between-subjects quasi-experimental design. The results suggest that service recovery has a significant impact on emotion, cognition and negative behavior. Similarly, satisfaction, negative emotion and positive emotion all influence negative behavior but distributive justice has no effect

O Efeito da Sinalização de Qualidade no Contexto de Serviços

Signaling theory states that signals are firms’ actions that communicate information about the quality of a product. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of signal quality in a service context, through the investigation of the signaling effects of price and responsiveness in a service context. Perceived behavior control, regarded as an individual's perception of the ability to perform a behavior, was proposed as a moderator between signaling variables and perceived quality. Two experimental studies with factorial and inter-subject designs were conducted in order to test the hypotheses formulated from the literature review. Results from both experiments show that signaling quality through price and responsiveness can affect perceived quality. The second experiment supports the hypothesis of perceived behavior control moderation between price as a signaling variable and perceived quality, but not between responsiveness and perceived quality. These results and their implications are discussed in the final section of the paper

Loneliness Around the World: Age, Gender, and Cultural Differences in Loneliness

© 2020 The Authors. The BBC Loneliness Experiment provided a unique opportunity to examine differences in the experience of lonelines across cultures, age, and gender, and the interaction between these factors. Using those data, we analysed the frequency of loneliness reported by 46,054 participants aged 16–99 years, living across 237 countries, islands, and territories, representing the full range of individualism-collectivism cultures, as defined by Hofstede (1997). Findings showed that loneliness increased with individualism, decreased with age, and was greater in men than in women. We also found that age, gender, and culture interacted to predict loneliness, although those interactions did not qualify the main effects, and simply accentuated them. We found the most vulnerable to loneliness were younger men living in individualistic cultures.Wellcome Trust [Funder reference: 209625/Z/17/Z]

Consumer Complaints and Company Market Value

Consumer complaints affect company market value and common sense suggests that a negative impact is expected. However, do complaints always negatively impact company market value? We hypothesize in this study that complaints may have a non-linear effect on market value. Positive (e.g. avoiding high costs to solve complaints) and negative (e.g. speedy and intense diffusion) tradeoffs may occur given the level of complaints. To test our non-linear hypothesis, a panel data was collected from cell phone service providers from 2005 to 2013. The results supported our tradeoff rationale. Low levels of complaints allow for companies to increase market value, while high levels of complaints cause increasing harm to market value. The sample, model and period considered in this study, indicates a level of 0.49 complaints per thousand consumers as the threshold for a shift in tradeoffs. The effects on market value become increasingly negative when trying to make reductions to move below this level, due to negative tradeoffs

Music-aided affective interaction between human and service robot

This study proposes a music-aided framework for affective interaction of service robots with humans. The framework consists of three systems, respectively, for perception, memory, and expression on the basis of the human brain mechanism. We propose a novel approach to identify human emotions in the perception system. The conventional approaches use speech and facial expressions as representative bimodal indicators for emotion recognition. But, our approach uses the mood of music as a supplementary indicator to more correctly determine emotions along with speech and facial expressions. For multimodal emotion recognition, we propose an effective decision criterion using records of bimodal recognition results relevant to the musical mood. The memory and expression systems also utilize musical data to provide natural and affective reactions to human emotions. For evaluation of our approach, we simulated the proposed human-robot interaction with a service robot, iRobiQ. Our perception system exhibited superior performance over the conventional approach, and most human participants noted favorable reactions toward the music-aided affective interaction.open0

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