Consumer Visual and Affective Bias for Soothing Dolls.

Soothing dolls are becoming increasingly popular in a society with a lot of physical and mental stress. Many products are also combined with soothing dolls to stimulate consumers' desire for impulse buying. However, there is no research on the relationship between consumers' purchasing behavior, consumers' preference for soothing dolls, and visual preference. The purpose of this study was to examine the possible factors that affect the emotional and visual preferences of soothing dolls. Two local stores' sales lists were used to extract three different types of dolls. The 2D and 3D versions of these three dolls were used. Subjective emotional preferences were examined by the self-assessment manikin (SAM) scale, with 5-point Likert scales for valence and arousal factors. An eye tracker was used to examine visual preferences, both before and after positive/negative emotion stimulation by the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). There were 37 subjects involved, with an age range of 20-28 years. The experimental results show that the average valence/arousal scores for 2D/3D dolls were (3.80, 3.74) and (2.65, 2.68), respectively. There was no statistical difference, but both 2D and 3D pictures had high valence scores. Eye tracker analysis revealed no gaze difference in visual preference between 2D and 3D dolls. After negative emotional picture stimulation, the observation time of the left-side doll decreased from 2.307 (std 0.905) to 1.947 (std 1.038) seconds, p < 0.001; and that of the right-side picture increased from 1.898 (std 0.907) to 2.252 (std 1.046) seconds, p < 0.001. The average observation time ratio of the eye on the 3D doll was 40.6%, higher than that on the 2D doll (34.3%, p = 0.02). Soothing dolls may be beneficial for emotion relaxation. Soothing dolls always have high valence features according to the SAM evaluation's measurement. Moreover, this study proposes a novel research model using an eye-tracker and the SAM for the SOR framework.

The Effects of Personality Traits on Rumors

The spread of rumors has often been linked to major social and political impacts with consequences that oftentimes may prove to be severe. While there are multiple factors that could make a rumor more believable, this paper focuses on investigating the effects of personality traits on believing or disbelieving rumors. Participants were given a survey which included rumors relating to a single topic, COVID-19, to avoid topic-bias. Participants were also given a personality test which assessed the participants’ traits based on the Big 5 Model and categorized them as high or low. The effect of valence (pleasure) and arousal (excitement) on believing or disbelieving rumors was also explored, along with how this effect differs from one trait to another. The results showed that people with high agreeableness tend to believe rumors more than people with low agreeableness and that there was a correlation between valence and believing rumors for people with high neuroticism and people with low agreeableness. No correlation was found between arousal and believing rumors for any of the personality traits. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.