Andrew R. Nesdale

Store atmosphere and purchasing behavior

Abstract This study extends the Donovan and Rossiter (1982) study which introduced the Mehrabian-Russell (M-R) environmental psychology model into the store atmosphere literature. Donovan and Rossiters study was exploratory in that student subjects were used and intentions rather than shopping behavior were measured. The present study uses a broader sample of shoppers, measures emotions during the shopping experience rather than before or after, and records the effects on actual shopping behavior. The 1982 study found that experienced pleasantness of the in-store environment was a significant predictor of willingness to spend time in the store and intentions to spend more money than originally planned. This finding was extended behaviorally in the new study: pleasure, as rated five minutes into the shopping duration was a significant predictor of extra time spent in the store and actual incremental spending. Arousal was found to vary in its effects across the two studies and bears further investigation. The effects of the emotional factors of pleasure and arousal were shown to be additional to cognitive factors such as variety and quality of merchandise, price specialing and value for money. The practical significance for retailers is that emotional responses induced by the store environment can affect the time and money that consumers spend in the store.

The development of young children's awareness of logical inconsistencies☆

Abstract Research by Markman (1979) suggests that children up to 12 years of age do not spontaneously detect logical inconsistencies. The present study was directed to factors which may limit childrens ability to recognize their failures to understand. A task was devised which involved materials that were clearly based on childrens experiences, and which involved premises and conclusions which were presented contiguously, rather than being interspersed among other sentences. Ninety-six 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence “stories” told by a puppet, and were asked to justify their responses. The stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent, and in whether the principle upon which a storys consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly stated. The results showed developmental differences. By Age 7 years, most children were quite capable of evaluating sentences for their logical consistency. Five-year-olds, however, did not perform as well on the task, especially when the information upon which the logical cohesiveness of the stories rested was implicitly, rather than explicitly, stated. An examination of the justifications provided by these children revealed that they tended to question the empirical validity of individual sentences, rather than integrate the story as a whole and examine its overall logical structure.

Phonological Awareness in Children

In examining the young child’s awareness of language, an appropriate place to start would seem to be with his awareness of the most elementary units of language, that is, with the child’s awareness of the phonological units. At this level the focus is on the extent to which the young child can both segment the spoken word into its component phonological units and synthesize these units to produce a word. While such a starting place might be considered to have an inherent appropriateness since the phoneme appears to be the most elementary unit of language, it has also become increasingly apparent in recent years that the child’s acquisition of phonological awareness is a crucially important achievement. Specifically, a series of recent studies has begun to articulate a significant role for phonological awareness in facilitating the child’s learning to read. On these grounds alone, it is clear that an understanding of this aspect of metalinguistic awareness is of no small importance.

Pragmatic Awareness in Children

Pragmatic awareness is concerned with the awareness or knowledge one has about the relationships that obtain within the linguistic system itself (e.g., across different sentences) and with the relationships that obtain between the linguistic system and the context in which the language is embedded (e.g., speaker’s ability to match his utterance to suit the listener’s previous knowledge and current perspective). Although treated as another component of the general term metalinguistic awareness, it is important to note from the outset that pragmatic awareness incorporates aspects that extend beyond linguistic considerations. Thus whereas areas such as phonological awareness and syntactic awareness are confined to knowledge concerning specific aspects of the language system and are purely linguistic in nature, pragmatic awareness involves knowledge that takes into account aspects which extend beyond the components of the language system itself.

The Development of Metalinguistic Awareness: A Methodological Overview

Although the study of the development of children’s metalinguistic awareness is still in its infancy, a surprising amount of research has already been accomplished [see reviews in this volume by Nesdale et al.; Bowey and Tunmer; Tunmer and Grieve; Pratt and Nesdale]. Nevertheless, as might be anticipated given the newness of the field and the complex and multifaceted nature of the construct, refined and generally accepted methods of assessing metalinguistic awareness are still in the process of being developed. To date, the methods which have been used by researchers have tended to vary quite markedly between studies and little attention has been given to the stability of children’s responses on the same task and procedure over a short term. In addition, the research conducted has tended to be cross-sectional. Together, these factors have contributed to the area being notably devoid of reliability and longitudinal data. And, they have reduced the possibility of close comparisons being made between studies utilizing different methods in order to determine which elements contributed to different levels and/or types of performance. In most areas of research on children’s metalinguistic awareness at the present time, it is unclear whether conflicting estimates revealed by different studies are due to sampling, task, procedural or measurement differences. At best, the available research allows for only imprecise estimates of, for example, the age at which a particular facet of metalinguistic awareness emerges and the period of its development.

Category salience, stereotyping and person memory

An experiment was conducted to examine the suggestion that category salience. manipulated by varying the ratio of subgroups (e.g., females, males) comprising a group, is linearly related to recall of the members” characteristics (S. E. Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman, 1978). Male and female subjects were presented with a tape and slide portrayal of an interacting group of 10 persons with one of three different gender ratios (9M-1F, 5M-5F, 1M-9F). Analysis of subjects recall of the contributions of one female and one male speaker indicated that group ratio interacted significantly with speaker gender and with subject gender. The results suggest that group ratio is not a negative linear function of group ratio and that what is recalled from a discussion depends upon characteristics of the speakers and the subjects as well as group ratio.

Emotional Arousal, Anger, and Aggression: The Misattribution Issue

Recent theories and research (Konecni, 1975a; & Rule Nesdale, 1976; Zillmann, 1978) have accorded anger a position of importance as a determinant of aggression. In contrast to current learning perspectives that treat anger as merely a setting condition (Berkowitz, 1971, 1974) or as irrelevant because much harm doing occurs in the absence of anger (Bandura, 1973), these recent attempts have delineated the relation between the emotional state of anger and aggressive behavior from a more cognitive orientation. Predictions in that research are based on assumptions deriving from Schachter and Singer’s (1962) theory of cognitive labeling, which postulates that people use cues present in the environment to label a state of undifferentiated arousal as a particular emotion. In our recent review of that literature (Rule & Nesdale, 1976), we have documented the observation that exposure to multiple sources of arousal, one of which is anger, either increases or decreases aggression. As the data and the specific explanations for the link between arousal and aggression have accumulated, however, it is clear that the current models of aggression and arousal and the hypotheses regarding their interrelation are incomplete. None of them, for example, provides an explication of how source attribution leads to labeling and how labeling affects response magnitude. The purpose of this chapter is to present a preliminary reconceptualization of the issues in the area by making explicit the factors we believe underlie source attribution, labeling, and response selection.

Young children's detection of propositional inconsistencies in oral communications

Abstract Markmans (1979) research suggests that children up to 12 years of age have difficulty in spontaneously detecting inconsistencies in communications. An experiment was designed to examine the influence of several factors which may affect childrens performance. Forty-eight pre-school and first-grade children were asked to judge eight stories told by a puppet. The stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent, long or short and whether the premise upon which a storys consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly stated. In addition, half the children were led to expect that some of the stories would not make sense whereas the remaining children were given no such expectation. The results showed that age and expectation influenced inconsistency detection. A significant interaction between length and premise type indicated that length influenced inconsistency detection when the premises were explicit but not implicit. A significant age × expectation × length interaction reveal...

Distraction and the Causal Attribution Process

Abstract To examine the effect on causal attributions of constraints on explanation seeking, subjects who were or were not distracted by a concurrent cognitive task observed a negative act that was either person expected or person unexpected. The results indicated that under no distraction conditions, person-expected behavior was attributed more to the actors dispositions than was person-unexpected behavior. Distracted observers, however, attributed the same behavior more to situational or indeterminate factors, regardless of person expectations. The findings suggest that observers can experience doubt regarding the cause of behavior and that they will make a provisional judgment in this situation, apparently pending the receipt of further information.

Cognition, Arousal, and Aggression

Although aggression and violence have always been an important human social problem, even cursory examination of the crime statistics for any western country leaves no doubt about the high incidence of homicides, muggings, rapes, bombings, and assassinations at the present time. Moreover, whether or not aggression and violence have increased in the past 10 or 20 years, the evidence indicates that people believe these to be violent times and are increasingly concerned for their safety (Scherer, Abeles, & Fischer, 1975).