Although it appears increasingly important yet potentially challenging to attract consumers to physical stores, location‐based messaging has been said to enable such attraction. Still, existing studies offer very limited insight into which particular location‐based persuasion approach retailers should use. This study aimed to establish and compare the potential of two discrepant persuasion strategies to influence consumers’ experiences and thereby stimulate them to visit the retailer's physical store. Drawing on persuasion theory and construal level theory, and using a vignette‐based online survey method, we determined that scarcity is a more effective persuasion strategy in the studied context than social proof; scarcity‐focused messages are experienced as more informative, more entertaining and less irritating, are therefore valued more, and are thus more likely to induce store visits. We discuss these findings and their implications for theory as well as for practice.
Depression is a highly prevalent and seriously impairing disorder. Evidence suggests that music therapy can decrease depression, though the music therapy that is offered is often not clearly described in studies. The purpose of this study was to develop an improvisational music therapy intervention based on insights from theory, evidence and clinical practice for young adults with depressive symptoms. The Intervention Mapping method was used and resulted in (1) a model to explain how emotion dysregulation may affect depressive symptoms using the Component Process Model (CPM) as a theoretical framework; (2) a model to clarify as to how improvisational music therapy may change depressive symptoms using synchronisation and emotional resonance; (3) a prototype Emotion-regulating Improvisational Music Therapy for Preventing Depressive symptoms (EIMT-PD); (4) a ten-session improvisational music therapy manual aimed at improving emotion regulation and reducing depressive symptoms; (5) a program implementation plan; and (6) a summary of a multiple baseline study protocol to evaluate the effectiveness and principles of EIMT-PD. EIMT-PD, using synchronisation and emotional resonance may be a promising music therapy to improve emotion regulation and, in line with our expectations, reduce depressive symptoms. More research is needed to assess its effectiveness and principles.
Being able to classify experienced emotions by identifying distinct neural responses has tremendous value in both fundamental research (e.g. positive psychology, emotion regulation theory) and in applied settings (clinical, healthcare, commercial). We aimed to decode the neural representation of the experience of two discrete emotions: sadness and disgust, devoid of differences in valence and arousal. In a passive viewing paradigm, we showed emotion evoking images from the International Affective Picture System to participants while recording their EEG. We then selected a subset of those images that were distinct in evoking either sadness or disgust (20 for each), yet were indistinguishable on normative valence and arousal. Event-related potential analysis of 69 participants showed differential responses in the N1 and EPN components and a support-vector machine classifier was able to accurately classify (58%) whole-brain EEG patterns of sadness and disgust experiences. These results support and expand on earlier findings that discrete emotions do have differential neural responses that are not caused by differences in valence or arousal.
