Estabilidade emocional, atribuição de causalidade e dissonância cognitiva

Neste estudo foram consideradas as teorias da atribuição de causalidade e da dissonância cognitiva, tendo como referência a necessidade psíquica de auto-consistência. O exame dos principais aspectos teóricos e empíricos destas duas teorias permitiu a conclusão de que as mesmas podem ser consideradas como mutuamente compatíveis e complementares. Foi realizado um experimento no qual os sujeitos, previamente diferenciados em instáveis e estáveis emocionalmente, foram submetidos a uma condição experimental fortemente dissonante, em relação ao auto-conceito (resolução de sete itens de um teste de inteligência, sendo cinco dos mesmos insolúveis). Foi realizada uma tarefa introdutória, da mesma natureza que a experimental, porém com itens solúveis, de mediana dificuldade. Foram medidos o número de acertos esperados e estimados (antes e após cada tarefa) além de se oferecer, a cada sujeito, a escolha, em uma listagem atribuicional, do motivo que, segundo ele, concorreu para o resultado por ele estimado, após a tarefa experimental. Os resultados indicaram que não houve diferença significativa entre as médias dos resultados estimados, dos dois grupos, após a tarefa experimental. As atribuições de causalidade dos dois grupos foram significativamente distintas, inclinando-se os estáveis para a internaIidade e os instáveis para a externalidade. Foram constatados, entretanto, diferenças bastante significativas entre as médias dos resultados esperados, antes das tarefas introdutória e experimental (média dos instáveis menor que a dos estáveis). Estes resultados foram interpretados como indicando uma intensa e precoce vivência dissonante, ao nível das expectativas dos resultados, por parte dos instáveis. A redução da dissonância ocorreu, preponderantemente, através da subestimação do número de acertos esperados nas duas tarefas propostas. A conclusão mais abrangente, deste estudo, colocou em relevo a grande importância das significações pessoais sobre os estímulos percebidos para a eliciação de respostas. Foram sugeridos novos estudos para melhor compreensão do assunto.

Lazer no contexto do estilo de vida de profissionais da saúde

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Anti-Americanism in Europe: Theoretical Mechanisms and Empirical Evidence

One of the most popular explanations for post-9/11 anti-Americanism argues that resentment against America and Americans is mainly a function of the US government’s unpopular actions. The present article challenges this interpretation: first, it argues that neither the vitality of the resentment in times when the United States had no influence in the respective parts of the world nor its recent radical manifestations are accounted for in a political reductionist framework. In fact, specific traditions of anti-Americanism have an influence on the negative attitudes observed today, as a comparison between Britain, France, Germany, and Poland reveals. Second, this article suggests an alternative theoretical approach. Anti-Americanism can be explained by two basic mechanisms: it functions as a strategy to project denied and disliked self-concepts onto an external object, and it offers an interpretation frame for complex social processes that allows to reduce cognitive dissonance. Multivariate analyses based on empirical data collected in the Pew surveys of 2002 and 2007 show the fruitfulness of our theoretical approach.

Procrastiner au péril de l'humanité : une perspective psychologique au problème du changement climatique

Dans ce mémoire, je cherche à rendre compte de l’inaction des individus à l’égard de la lutte contre les changements climatiques. Je soutiens que la procrastination permet d’expliquer l’inaction de certaines personnes à la fois informées et préoccupées par cet enjeu environnemental. Dans un premier temps, je présente différentes conceptions de la procrastination en philosophie. J’avance que la procrastination n’est pas nécessairement un comportement irrationnel et propose une définition descriptive de celle-ci. Dans un deuxième temps, je valide la légitimité du concept de la procrastination pour décrire l’attitude de certains individus face au changement climatique. Dans un troisième temps, je présente différents facteurs de la procrastination relative au changement climatique, à savoir les émotions négatives, la perspective temporelle, les préférences intransitives et la dissonance cognitive. Je conclus que la procrastination eu égard au changement climatique s’explique ultimement par une stratégie à court terme de régulation des émotions.

Procrastiner au péril de l'humanité : une perspective psychologique au problème du changement climatique.

Dans ce mémoire, je cherche à rendre compte de l’inaction des individus à l’égard de la lutte contre les changements climatiques. Je soutiens que la procrastination permet d’expliquer l’inaction de certaines personnes à la fois informées et préoccupées par cet enjeu environnemental. Dans un premier temps, je présente différentes conceptions de la procrastination en philosophie. J’avance que la procrastination n’est pas nécessairement un comportement irrationnel et propose une définition descriptive de celle-ci. Dans un deuxième temps, je valide la légitimité du concept de la procrastination pour décrire l’attitude de certains individus face au changement climatique. Dans un troisième temps, je présente différents facteurs de la procrastination relative au changement climatique, à savoir les émotions négatives, la perspective temporelle, les préférences intransitives et la dissonance cognitive. Je conclus que la procrastination eu égard au changement climatique s’explique ultimement par une stratégie à court terme de régulation des émotions.

Expanding the scope of the social response context model

Descriptive models of social response are concerned with identifying and discriminating between different types of response to social influence. In a previous article (Nail, MacDonald, & Levy, 2000), the authors demonstrated that 4 conceptual dimensions are necessary to adequately distinguish between such phenomena as conformity, compliance, contagion, independence, and anticonformity in a single model. This article expands the scope of the authors' 4-dimensional approach by reviewing selected experimental and cultural evidence, further demonstrating the integrative power of the model. This review incorporates political psychology, culture and aggression, self-persuasion, group norms, prejudice, impression management, psychotherapy, pluralistic ignorance, bystander intervention/nonintervention, public policy, close relationships, and implicit attitudes.

Shadowing experiences and the extension of communities of practice: A case study of women education managers

Recent developments in workplace learning have focused on relational and social network views of learning that introduce practitioners to the norms, values and assumptions of the workplace as well as the learning processes through which knowledge is acquired. This article reports on a qualitative study of a mentoring programme designed to assist women education managers gain promotion by broadening their networks and stimulating insights into the senior management positions for which they were being prepared. The findings are that members reflexively assess and reassess goals and values to demystify knowledge and resolved cognitive dissonance in these processes. Moreover, this article shows that women participants learn from the networks, and that the networks learn from the participant in a reciprocal and informal way. The article concludes that organizational learning programmes must focus on enabling such networks to flourish.

Negative brand personality:the construct, its antecedents and outcome variables

By evolving brands and building on the importance of self-expression, Aaker (1997) developed the brand personality framework as a means to understand brand-consumer relationships. The brand personality framework captures the core values and characteristics described in human personality research in an attempt to humanize brands. Although influential across many streams of brand personality research, the current conceptualization of brand personality only offers a positively-framed approach. To date, no research, both conceptually and empirically, has thoroughly incorporated factors reflective of Negative Brand Personality, despite the fact that almost all researchers in personality are in agreement that factors akin to Extraversion (positive) and Neuroticism (negative) should be in a comprehensive personality scale to accommodate consumers’ expressions. As a result, the study of brand personality is only half complete since the current research trend is to position brand personality under brand image. However, with the brand personality concept being confused with brand identity at the empirical stage, factors reflective of Negative Brand Personality have been neglected. Accordingly, this thesis extends the current conceptualization of brand personality by demarcating the existing typologies of desirable brand personality and incorporating the characteristics reflective of consumers’ discrepant self-meaning to provide a more complete understanding of brand personality. However, it is not enough to interpret negative factors as the absence of positive factors. Negative factors reflect consumers’ anxious and frustrated feelings. Therefore, this thesis contributes to the current conceptualization of brand personality by, firstly, presenting a conceptual definition of Negative Brand Personality in order to provide a theoretical basis for the development of a Negative Brand Personality scale, then, secondly, identifying what constitutes Negative Brand Personality and to what extent consumers’ cognitive dissonance explains the nature of Negative Brand Personality, and, thirdly, ascertaining the impact Negative Brand Personality has on attitudinal constructs, namely: Negative Attitude, Detachment, Brand Loyalty and Satisfaction, which have proven to predict behaviors such as choice and (re-)purchasing. In order to deliver on the three main contributions, two comprehensive studies were conducted to a) develop a valid, parsimonious, yet relatively short measure of Negative Brand Personality, and b) ascertain how the Negative Brand Personality measure behaves within a network of related constructs. The mixed methods approach, grounded in theoretical and empirical development, provides evidence to suggest that there are four factors to Negative Brand Personality and, tested through use of a structural equation modeling technique, that these are influenced by Brand Confusion, Price Unfairness, Self- Incongruence and Corporate Hypocrisy. Negative Brand Personality factors mainly determined Consumers Negative Attitudes and Brand Detachment. The research contributes to the literature on brand personality by improving the consumer-brand relationship by means of engaging in a brandconsumer conversation in order to reduce consumers’ cognitive strain. The study concludes with a discussion on the theoretical and practical implications of the findings, its limitations, and potential directions for future research.

Globalizing the Sculptural Landscapes of the Sarapis and Isis Cults in Hellenistic and Roman Greece

“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs.

I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.

In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.

Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.

These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.

Consumer Behavior and Firm Competition

Understanding consumer behavior is critical for firms' decision making. How consumers make decisions about what they want and buy directly affect the profits of firms. Therefore, it is important to consider consumer behaviors and incorporate them into the model when studying the optimal strategy of firms and competition between firms. In this dissertation, I study rich and interesting consumer behaviors and their impact on firms' strategy in two essays. The first essay considers consumers' shopping cost which leads to their preference for one-stop shopping. I examine how store visit costs and consumer knowledge about a product affect the strategic store choice of consumers and, in turn, the pricing, customer service and advertising decisions of competing retailers. My analysis offers insights on how specialty stores can compete with big-box retailers. In the second essay, I focus on a well-established psychology phenomenon, cognitive dissonance. I incorporate the idea of cognitive dissonance into a model of spatial competition and examine its implications for selling strategy. I provide new insight on the profitability of advance selling and spot selling as well as the pricing of bundle and its components. Collectively, two essays in this dissertation introduce novel ways to model consumer behaviors and help to understand the impact of consumer behaviors on firm profitability and strategy.

Understanding Notional Machines through Traditional Teaching with Conceptual Contraposition and Program Memory Tracing

A correct understanding about how computers run code is mandatory in order to effectively learn to program. Lectures have historically been used in programming courses to teach how computers execute code, and students are assessed through traditional evaluation methods, such as exams. Constructivism learning theory objects to students’ passiveness during lessons, and traditional quantitative methods for evaluating a complex cognitive process such as understanding. Constructivism proposes complimentary techniques, such as conceptual contraposition and colloquies. We enriched lectures of a “Programming II” (CS2) course combining conceptual contraposition with program memory tracing, then we evaluated students’ understanding of programming concepts through colloquies. Results revealed that these techniques applied to the lecture are insufficient to help students develop satisfactory mental models of the C++ notional machine, and colloquies behaved as the most comprehensive traditional evaluations conducted in the course.

Insatisfação com sistemas organizacionais e repercussão no atendimento a clientes

O objetivo central deste trabalho interdisciplinar é verter um facho de luz sobre a relação entre a insatisfação com sistemas organizacionais e a dissonância cognitiva no atendimento a clientes. Os vendedores e seus clientes, de três unidades de uma rede de vendas de veículos autorizada a atuar no Sul do Brasil, foram selecionados para a pesquisa. Dois instrumentos de coleta de dados foram construídos pelo autor, para investigar os selecionados. Eles foram aplicados em dois momentos distintos. No primeiro, os vendedores e seus clientes responderam a questões sobre atendimento, nas diversas fases de vendas. No segundo, os vendedores responderam a questões sobre o sistema organizacional da rede, por meio de instrumento construído com base nas proposições de Spitzer (1997). A teoria bidimensional de Herzberg foi utilizada na construção da ponte entre os resultadoschave observados nas duas pesquisas. A constatação desse autor, sobre a influência da insatisfação com fatores higiênicos na motivação, foi ratificada.

Dissonance between conceptions of learning and ways of learning for indigenous Australian university students

This article reports on a phenomenographic investigation into conceptions of learning for 15 Indigenous Australian university students over the three years of their degree courses. The ways in which they went about learning were also investigated along with the relationship between individual students' 'core' conceptions of learning and the ways in which they learned. Results indicated that their conceptions and ways of learning were similar in some respects to those found for other university students. However, some students went about learning in ways that were incongruent with the core conception of learning they held. This can be regarded as dissonance between strategies and conceptions of learning. The implications of this for teaching and learning for such students are discussed.