Gender identity and breast cancer campaigns

Concerning itself with understanding how marketing methods and tools can be of benefit to healthcare professionals, health marketing is an area of research that has grown substantially in recent years. Of much interest to the sector is whether awareness campaigns are effective in increasing the public’s perceived vulnerability to any given disease

Linear Scaling Solution of the Coulomb problem using wavelets

The Coulomb problem for continuous charge distributions is a central problem in physics. Powerful methods, that scale linearly with system size and that allow us to use different resolutions in different regions of space are therefore highly desirable. Using wavelet based Multi Resolution Analysis we derive for the first time a method which has these properties. The power and accuracy of the method is illustrated by applying it to the calculation of of the electrostatic potential of a full three-dimensional all-electron Uranium dimer

Multiresolution analysis in statistical mechanics. II. The wavelet transform as a basis for Monte Carlo simulations on lattices

In this paper, we extend our analysis of lattice systems using the wavelet transform to systems for which exact enumeration is impractical. For such systems, we illustrate a wavelet-accelerated Monte Carlo (WAMC) algorithm, which hierarchically coarse-grains a lattice model by computing the probability distribution for successively larger block spins. We demonstrate that although the method perturbs the system by changing its Hamiltonian and by allowing block spins to take on values not permitted for individual spins, the results obtained agree with the analytical results in the preceding paper, and ``converge'' to exact results obtained in the absence of coarse-graining. Additionally, we show that the decorrelation time for the WAMC is no worse than that of Metropolis Monte Carlo (MMC), and that scaling laws can be constructed from data performed in several short simulations to estimate the results that would be obtained from the original simulation. Although the algorithm is not asymptotically faster than traditional MMC, because of its hierarchical design, the new algorithm executes several orders of magnitude faster than a full simulation of the original problem. Consequently, the new method allows for rapid analysis of a phase diagram, allowing computational time to be focused on regions near phase transitions.Comment: 11 pages plus 7 figures in PNG format (downloadable separately

Gender identity and breast cancer campaigns

Concerning itself with understanding how marketing methods and tools can be of benefit to healthcare professionals, health marketing is an area of research that has grown substantially in recent years. Of much interest to the sector is whether awareness campaigns are effective in increasing the public’s perceived vulnerability to any given disease

Gender Identity Salience and Perceived Vulnerability to Breast Cancer

Contrary to predictions based on cognitive accessibility, heightened gender identity salience resulted in lower perceived vulnerability and reduced donation behavior to identity-specific risks (e.g., breast cancer). No such effect was manifest with identity-neutral risks. Establishing the importance of self-identity, perceived breast cancer vulnerability was lower when women were

Evaluative Conditioning 2.0: Direct versus Associative Transfer of Affect to Brands

A basic assumption in advertising is that brands become more well-liked after they were presented in positive contexts. This assumption is warranted because studies on ‘evaluative conditioning’ have demonstrated that when a brand is repeatedly presented together with positive affective stimuli (e.g., beautiful people, nature scenes, celebrity endorsers …), this results indeed in a long-lasting positive effect on the evaluation of the brand. This dissertation deals with the primary question of what is causing this change in attitudes. It is shown that there are at least two fundamentally different psychological processes that can cause this change in brand attitude. First, it is possible that through the establishment of memory associations between the brand and the positive affective stimuli, the brand becomes more positively evaluated (associative affect transfer). Second, it is also possible to transfer positive affect directly to the brand. In this case, affect ‘rubs off’ to the brand without the need to establish memory associations (direct affect transfer). The conditions under which affect transfer will be associative versus direct are identified. It is also demonstrated that achieving direct affect transfer carries distinct advantages for advertisers. With direct affect transfer – as opposed to associative affect transfer – the brand becomes immune to the negative effects of its endorsers falling from grace, to interference of the memory traces and to consumers’ counter arguing strategies

Puppets on a String

For more than a century, scholars in psychology have debated whether humans are ‘of two minds,’ that is, whether they have both conscious and unconscious thoughts, and whether both conscious and unconscious thought processes determine their behavior. According to Freud’s iceberg model, conscious thought is just the tip of the iceberg, with most of our thought processes taking place unconsciously. Marketing scholars and practitioners have embraced the iceberg model with great enthusiasm. They have incorporated models where people’s drives and motivations are built in layers, with only the top layer consciously accessible, but the real drivers hidden underneath. According to one of the most influential contemporary theories, human thinking is governed by dual systems. System 1, it is argued, is the evolutionarily oldest system, based in parts of the brain we share with lower animals, operates unconsciously, uncontrollably, with low effort, has huge capacity, is fast, nonverbal, parallel, and associative. System 2, conversely, is evolutionarily more recent, resides in our frontal cortex, operates consciously, controllably, with high effort, has small capacity, is slow, verbal, serial, and based on rules. Despite their intuitive appeal, dual system theories have been challenged in recent years. I discuss some of their more problematic aspects and the research I have conducted testing core propositions of the dual system approach. Especially my research on the way brands become more well-liked through advertising and conditioning procedures is highly relevant for the debate, but so is research on people’s risk perceptions and self-control performance. Overall, I have seen support for some of the key predictions of dual process theory, but no support at all for its strong claim that mental processes should clearly belong to one of two systems with highly separable features. I argue that we need to acknowledge that the human mind cannot be neatly divided into two complementary processing systems. Rather, we should recognize that thought processes can be characterized to a greater or lesser extent by some but not all the features of automaticity. Researchers should start recognizing the full complexity of the human mind and embrace research that is more detailed, more precise – and perhaps a bit less grand in its claims

Multiresolution analysis in statistical mechanics. I. Using wavelets to calculate thermodynamic properties

The wavelet transform, a family of orthonormal bases, is introduced as a technique for performing multiresolution analysis in statistical mechanics. The wavelet transform is a hierarchical technique designed to separate data sets into sets representing local averages and local differences. Although one-to-one transformations of data sets are possible, the advantage of the wavelet transform is as an approximation scheme for the efficient calculation of thermodynamic and ensemble properties. Even under the most drastic of approximations, the resulting errors in the values obtained for average absolute magnetization, free energy, and heat capacity are on the order of 10%, with a corresponding computational efficiency gain of two orders of magnitude for a system such as a $4\times 4$ Ising lattice. In addition, the errors in the results tend toward zero in the neighborhood of fixed points, as determined by renormalization group theory.Comment: 13 pages plus 7 figures (PNG

Evaluative Conditioning 2.0: Referential versus Intrinsic Learning of Affective Value

Evaluative conditioning is an important determinant of consumers’ likes and dislikes. Three experiments show that it can result from two types of learning. First, stimulus-stimulus (S – S) or referential learning allows a conditioned stimulus (e.g., a brand) to acquire valence by triggering (unconscious) recollections of the unconditioned stimulus (e.g., a pleasant image). Second, stimulus-response (S – R) or intrinsic learning allows a conditioned stimulus to bind directly with the affective response that was previously generated by the unconditioned stimulus. We show when each type of learning occurs and demonstrate the consequences for the robustness of conditioned brand attitudes

An efficient numerical quadrature for the calculation of the potential energy of wavefunctions expressed in the Daubechies wavelet basis

An efficient numerical quadrature is proposed for the approximate calculation of the potential energy in the context of pseudo potential electronic structure calculations with Daubechies wavelet and scaling function basis sets. Our quadrature is also applicable in the case of adaptive spatial resolution. Our theoretical error estimates are confirmed by numerical test calculations of the ground state energy and wave function of the harmonic oscillator in one dimension with and without adaptive resolution. As a byproduct we derive a filter, which, upon application on the scaling function coefficients of a smooth function, renders the approximate grid values of this function. This also allows for a fast calculation of the charge density from the wave function.Comment: 35 pages, 9 figures. Submitted to: Journal of Computational Physic