An EEG study on emotional intelligence and advertising message effectiveness

Some electroencephalography (EEG) studies have investigated emotional intelligence (EI), but none have examined the relationships between EI and commercial advertising messages and related consumer behaviors. This study combines brain (EEG) techniques with an EI psychometric to explore the brain responses associated with a range of advertisements. A group of 45 participants (23females, 22males) had their EEG recorded while watching a series of advertisements selected from various marketing categories such as community interests, celebrities, food/drink, and social issues. Participants were also categorized as high or low in emotional intelligence (n = 34). The EEG data analysis was centered on rating decision-making in order to measure brain responses associated with advertising information processing for both groups. The findings suggest that participants with high and low emotional intelligence (EI) were attentive to different types of advertising messages. The two EI groups demonstrated preferences for “people” or “object,” related advertising information. This suggests that differences in consumer perception and emotions may suggest why certain advertising material or marketing strategies are effective or not

Exploring the effects of perceived service provider sincerity on consumers\u27 emotional state and satisfaction during service consumption

A holistic approach to satisfaction and its effects seems to be particularly important in high-affect, high-involvement, and extended duration services such as those offered by many travel and tourism providers. This means understanding the complexities of service provision and its processes. Consumers value service interaction that appears sincere. For this reason, organizations expect service providers to manage their service "performance" to reflect a genuine display of positive emotions towards the customer, which has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and possibly overall life satisfaction. This study explores consumers\u27 perception of sincerity and tests its effects on positive emotions and satisfaction in an extended duration service. The findings indicate that perceived service sincerity positively influences consumers\u27 emotions during a service and has important direct and indirect effects on life satisfaction, service satisfaction, and intention to repurchase. Implications for managers and opportunities for further research are discussed

A neuroimaging study of personality traits and self-reflection

This study examines the blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) activation of the brain associated with the four distinctive thinking styles associated with the four personality orientations of the Gountas Personality Orientations (GPO) survey: Emotion/Feeling-Action, Material/Pragmatic, Intuitive/Imaginative, and Thinking/Logical. The theoretical postulation is that each of the four personality orientations has a dominant (primary) thinking style and a shadow (secondary) thinking style/trait. The participants (N = 40) were initially surveyed to determine their dominant (primary) and secondary thinking styles. Based on participant responses, equal numbers of each dominant thinking style were selected for neuroimaging using a unique fMRI cognitive activation paradigm. The neuroimaging data support the general theoretical hypothesis of the existence of four different BOLD activation patterns, associated with each of the four thinking styles. The fMRI data analysis suggests that each thinking style may have its own cognitive activation system, involving the frontal ventromedial, posterior medial, parietal, motor, and orbitofrontal cortex. The data also suggest that there is a left hemisphere relationship for the Material/Pragmatic and Thinking/Logical styles and a right activation relationship for Emotional/Feeling and Intuitive/Imaginative styles. Additionally, the unique self-reflection paradigm demonstrated that perception of self or self-image, may be influenced by personality type; a finding of potentially far-reaching implications

Personality and motivation matter in touring holidays: a preliminary investigation into heterogeneity among touring travelers

Touring travelers represent a significant market in Australia and are expected to play an even larger role in the future. Yet, to date, they are viewed and treated like one large homogeneous market. The aim of the present study was to question this assumption and investigate whether distinct segments exist among touring travelers. Results, based on an empirical study of 430 Australian travelers, indicate that at least two distinct segments can be constructed which differ in travel motivations, sociodemographics, and personality characteristics. These findings can be used to segment and harvest the market of tourist travelers through the development of targeted products and marketing messages

Personality types and tourism holiday preferences

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Subjective and Confirmatory Personal Introspections of Cultural City Holidays

Purpose – This paper aims to explore tourism consumer’s perceptions of cultural, emotional and behavioural differences. The subjective personal introspection (SPI) approach is used to investigate specific cultural differences which impact tourism satisfaction. It aims to identify the key attributes of cultural tourism satisfaction by comparing three European cities. The cultural attributes are synthesised into a confirmatory personal introspection (CPI), and a provisional research model is proposed. Design/methodology/approach – The research data of the cultural experiences are based on SPI data of “native-visitors” to London and ordinary visitors to Venice and Barcelona. The duration and the travel arrangements are the same for all three cultural experiences. The CPI uses thought experiments to formulate new research propositions. Findings – The SPI results show that the tourism gaze focus can be the cognitive-affective experiences of cultural holidays. Tourism consumer satisfaction is dependent on the quality of natural and man-made attractions and the social-emotional interactions between the hosts and guests in a destination. The three cities in our research, London, Venice and Barcelona, have different micro-cultures and levels of social-emotional interactions vary considerably between them. Overall tourism satisfaction is hypothesised to be influenced by the degree of social interaction and micro-cultural differences. Practical implications – The findings support the usefulness of SPI in tourism consumer research. SPI research findings produce in-depth understandings of the cultural tourism product attributes which cannot be captured in any other way. The personal insights are valuable to marketing professionals because they provide first-hand feedback of consumer’s perceptions over a longer period than a focus group session. The confirmatory introspections are valuable hypotheses to be tested empirically with specific tourism segments to identify product strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats. Originality/value – The use of SPI and CPI produces original hypotheses of the cultural tourism attributes which influence tourism satisfaction. The paper demonstrates that the tourism gaze can be expanded to investigate the cognitive-affective observations which have a direct effect on tourism satisfaction and decision-making

Self-concept and motivation as predictors of actual consumer behaviour

The need to predict consumer behaviour outcomes is considered to be a very important issue for marketers. Isolated individual psychological constructs such as attitudes, motives, personality traits and learning styles have been used to identify their predictive capacity for actual consumer behaviour with varying degrees of success. This paper attempts to testempirically the predictive power of two constructs, motivation and self-concept, regarding business consumer&rsquo;s actions in a service context, using an Australian representative sample.<br /

Psychophysiological investigations of individual differences (personality orientations) using EEG & fMRI

Background: Previous studies have investigated the neural networks associated with personality orientations and introspection of self (Bjornebekket al., 2013; Zhu et al. 2012). Introspection is a process of self-monitoring, consciously thinking of one's feelings and thoughts which reflect ones' personality. To explore this further, EEG and fMRI techniques were employed in two studies which investigated the psychophysiological correlates associated with personality and thinking styles using a personality orientations model based on the Jungian four personality functions; the Gountas Personality Orientation (GPO). The GPO measures the strength of each thinking style; Emotion (E), Material (M), Intuitive/Imaginative (I) and Logical (L). The EEG & fMRI studies examined functional distribution of networks and examined whether specific neural networks exist for each orientation. Method: In the EEG study, 43 participants (M = 30.8, SD = 11.9 years) were tested doing a language based decision task while recording from 64 scalp EEG electrodes. Eye movement and other artifacts were removed during post recording analysis. The EEG Alpha coherence was calculated for the epoch associated with decision making (rating). This study was extended by testing an additional 40 participants (M = 27.5 SD 7.6 years) using a fMRI block design protocol. Functional activities (BOLD Response) were correlated with a series of language based and introspection decision making tasks. Results: In support of the EEG coherence results, the neuroimaging data suggest that different decision neural networks exist and are associated with each thinking style and personality orientation during decision making tasks. Discussion/Conclusion: These data suggest a left hemisphere relationship for the M and L types and a right neural network relationship for E and I types. The implications associated with decision making and individual thinking styles will be discussed