The Effects of Previous Misestimation of Task Duration on Estimating Future Task Duration

It is a common time management problem that people underestimate the duration of tasks, which has been termed the "planning fallacy." To overcome this, it has been suggested that people should be informed about how long they previously worked on the same task. This study, however, tests whether previous misestimation also affects the duration estimation of a novel task, even if the feedback is only self-generated. To test this, two groups of participants performed two unrelated, laboratory-based tasks in succession. Learning was manipulated by permitting only the experimental group to retrospectively estimate the duration of the first task before predicting the duration of the second task. Results showed that the experimental group underestimated the duration of the second task less than the control group, which indicates a general kind of learning from previous misestimation. The findings imply that people could be trained to carefully observe how much they misestimate task duration in order to stimulate learning. The findings are discussed in relation to the anchoring account of task duration misestimation and the memory-bias account of the planning fallacy. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Feelings generated by threat appeals in social marketing: text and emoji analysis of user reactions to anorexia nervosa campaigns in social media

Threat appeals in social marketing have been widely researched regarding their effects in behaviour change. However, little is known about their emotional effects in individuals. Feelings generated by threat appeals have proved to be ambiguous. Considering that understanding the emotional effects of message frames has implications in long-term behaviour change, this paper aims at understanding the feelings generated by threat appeals, considering the inconsistent findings in the literature. The research analyses the feelings produced by threat appeals in two social networks - Facebook and YouTube. A sentiment analysis of forty non-governmental campaigns regarding anorexia nervosa awareness was conducted through two methodological forms. First, we have analysed the content of the comments made by users by text analysis; second, we have coded the emoji expressing feelings from the users in the same campaigns and have quantified their interactions. Results indicate that feelings generated by threat appeals regarding anorexia nervosa campaigns in social media may be both positive and negative, with a great expression of fear, sadness and empathy, corroborating the ambiguous findings. Positive feelings are most prominent in emoji and reveal support, compassion and admiration both for campaign messages and for people suffering from anorexia. Negative feelings, such as fear and sadness, arise especially as a consequence of awareness and concerns. The paper contributes to the discussion of this ambivalent topic of research and also experiments two different sentiment analysis techniques – text and emoji analysis -, with different result outcomes.- (undefined