Touched by your words: How touch-related vocabulary prompts charitable behavior by reducing the negative effect of disgust.

Getting help is often difficult for people who trigger disgust (e.g., homeless, sick, or disabled people) as well as the charities representing them because of low trust in these groups. Prior research has demonstrated that physical contact can help increase generosity. However, it is difficult to trigger this phenomenon-called Midas Touch Effect-when people feel disgust and are uncomfortable with interpersonal touch. This research examines touch-related vocabulary (e.g., "I would be touched," "anyone who I can contact") as an alternative, non-physical way for prompting the Midas Touch Effect. This research examines if such a vocabulary may reduce the negative effects of disgust on trust, and thus increase the willingness to donate. Across two studies, it is shown that while disgust has a negative effect on trust and willingness to donate to a homeless person when no touch-related vocabulary is used, no such negative effect is observed when the message includes touch-related vocabulary.

Crossmodal Congruency Between Background Music and the Online Store Environment: The Moderating Role of Shopping Goals.

Despite the robust evidence that congruent background music in the physical store environment positively affects consumer reactions, less is known about its effects in an online context. The present study aims (1) to examine whether congruency via multiple elicited crossmodal correspondences between background music and the online store environment (e.g., perceived lightness, loudness, and coldness of the cue/environment) leads to more positive affective, evaluative, and behavioral consumer reactions and (2) to investigate the moderating role of shopping goals on this crossmodal congruency effect. Previous research showed that low task-relevant atmospheric cues like music can have a negative effect on consumers when they visit a website with a purchase goal in mind. An online experiment was conducted with 239 respondents randomly assigned to a shopping goal (experiential browsing vs. goal-directed searching) and a music condition (no music, crossmodally congruent music, or crossmodally incongruent music). Our results show that crossmodally incongruent background music (vs. no music) leads to more positive consumer reactions for experiential browsers and more negative consumer reactions for goal-directed searchers. Conversely, crossmodally congruent background music (vs. no music) has a positive effect on experiential browsers and no adverse effect on goal-directed searchers. Additionally, the presence of crossmodally congruent background music leads to more positive consumer reactions than the presence of crossmodally incongruent background music, independent of the shopping goal. We extend previous research on multisensory congruency effects by showing the added value of establishing congruency between music and the store environment via multiple elicited crossmodal correspondences in the online environment, countering previously found negative effects of low-task relevant atmospheric cues for goal-directed searchers.

Consumer Consciousness in Multisensory Extended Reality.

The reality-virtuality continuum encompasses a multitude of objects, events and environments ranging from real-world multisensory inputs to interactive multisensory virtual simulators, in which sensory integration can involve very different combinations of both physical and digital inputs. These different ways of stimulating the senses can affect the consumer's consciousness, potentially altering their judgements and behaviours. In this perspective paper, we explore how technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) can, by generating and modifying the human sensorium, act on consumer consciousness. We discuss the potential impact of this altered consciousness for consumer behaviour while, at the same time, considering how it may pave the way for further research.

Virtual Terroir and the Premium Coffee Experience.

With its origin-centric value proposition, the specialty coffee industry seeks to educate consumers about the value of the origin of coffee and how the relationship with farmers ensures quality and makes coffee a premium product. While the industry has widely used stories and visual cues to communicate this added value, research studying whether and how these efforts influence consumers' experiences is scarce. Through three experiments, we explored the effect of images that evoke the terroir of coffee on the perception of premiumness. Our results revealed that online images that resembled the broad origin of coffee (i.e., a farm) could influence premiumness expectations of coffee (Experiment 1). Similarly, a virtual reality environment that depicted this broad origin (vs. a control but not a city atmosphere) could enhance the perception of coffee premiumness for non-expert consumers (Experiment 2) and the enjoyment of the experience for coffee professionals (Experiment 3). Importantly, we found that congruence between the coffee and the virtual reality (VR) atmospheres mediated how much non-experts enjoyed the experience (Experiment 2). VR atmospheres also influenced expectations of sweetness and acidity for non-experts (Experiment 2). These findings serve as a steppingstone for further exploration of the effects of congruence between visual cues and product/brand attributes on premiumness expectations and perception, and more generally on consumer experience. From a practical standpoint, this study provides insights into key aspects for the development of immersive virtual product experiences.

Taste at first (person) sight: Visual perspective modulates brain activity implicitly associated with viewing unhealthy but not healthy foods.

Every day, people are exposed to images of appetizing foods that can lead to high-calorie intake and contribute to overweight and obesity. Research has documented that manipulating the visual perspective from which eating is viewed helps resist temptation by altering the appraisal of unhealthy foods. However, the neural basis of this effect has not yet been examined using neuroimaging methods. Moreover, it is not known whether the benefits of this strategy can be observed when people, especially overweight, are not explicitly asked to imagine themselves eating. Last, it remains to be investigated if visual perspective could be used to promote healthy foods. The present work manipulated camera angles and tested whether visual perspective modulates activity in brain regions associated with taste and reward processing while participants watch videos featuring a hand grasping (unhealthy or healthy) foods from a plate during functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI). The plate was filmed from the perspective of the participant (first-person perspective; 1PP), or from a frontal view as if watching someone else eating (third-person perspective; 3PP). Our findings reveal that merely viewing unhealthy food cues from a 1PP (vs. 3PP) increases activity in brain regions that underlie representations of rewarding (appetitive) experiences (amygdala) and food intake (superior parietal gyrus). Additionally, our results show that ventral striatal activity is positively correlated with body mass index (BMI) during exposure to unhealthy foods from a 1PP (vs. 3PP). These findings suggest that unhealthy foods should be promoted through third-person (video) images to weaken the reward associated with their simulated consumption, especially amongst overweight people. It appears however that, as such, manipulating visual perspective fails to enhance the perception of healthy foods. Their promotion thus requires complementary solutions.

Multisensory Technology for Flavor Augmentation: A Mini Review.

There is growing interest in the development of new technologies that capitalize on our emerging understanding of the multisensory influences on flavor perception in order to enhance human-food interaction design. This review focuses on the role of (extrinsic) visual, auditory, and haptic/tactile elements in modulating flavor perception and more generally, our food and drink experiences. We review some of the most exciting examples of recent multisensory technologies for augmenting such experiences. Here, we discuss applications for these technologies, for example, in the field of food experience design, in the support of healthy eating, and in the rapidly growing world of sensory marketing. However, as the review makes clear, while there are many opportunities for novel human-food interaction design, there are also a number of challenges that will need to be tackled before new technologies can be meaningfully integrated into our everyday food and drink experiences.

Using food insecurity in health prevention to promote consumer's embodied self-regulation.

Health messages designed to address obesity are typically focused on the long-term benefits of eating healthy food. However, according to the insurance hypothesis, obese people are food insecure, and this causes them to be overly concerned about short-term consumption. As such, it is necessary to rethink public health messaging and consider how to reduce short-term insecurity by eating healthy food.

Health and Pleasure in Consumers' Dietary Food Choices: Individual Differences in the Brain's Value System.

Taking into account how people value the healthiness and tastiness of food at both the behavioral and brain levels may help to better understand and address overweight and obesity-related issues. Here, we investigate whether brain activity in those areas involved in self-control may increase significantly when individuals with a high body-mass index (BMI) focus their attention on the taste rather than on the health benefits related to healthy food choices. Under such conditions, BMI is positively correlated with both the neural responses to healthy food choices in those brain areas associated with gustation (insula), reward value (orbitofrontal cortex), and self-control (inferior frontal gyrus), and with the percent of healthy food choices. By contrast, when attention is directed towards health benefits, BMI is negatively correlated with neural activity in gustatory and reward-related brain areas (insula, inferior frontal operculum). Taken together, these findings suggest that those individuals with a high BMI do not necessarily have reduced capacities for self-control but that they may be facilitated by external cues that direct their attention toward the tastiness of healthy food. Thus, promoting the taste of healthy food in communication campaigns and/or food packaging may lead to more successful self-control and healthy food behaviors for consumers with a higher BMI, an issue which needs to be further researched.

Eating with our eyes: From visual hunger to digital satiation.

One of the brain's key roles is to facilitate foraging and feeding. It is presumably no coincidence, then, that the mouth is situated close to the brain in most animal species. However, the environments in which our brains evolved were far less plentiful in terms of the availability of food resources (i.e., nutriments) than is the case for those of us living in the Western world today. The growing obesity crisis is but one of the signs that humankind is not doing such a great job in terms of optimizing the contemporary food landscape. While the blame here is often put at the doors of the global food companies - offering addictive foods, designed to hit 'the bliss point' in terms of the pleasurable ingredients (sugar, salt, fat, etc.), and the ease of access to calorie-rich foods - we wonder whether there aren't other implicit cues in our environments that might be triggering hunger more often than is perhaps good for us. Here, we take a closer look at the potential role of vision; Specifically, we question the impact that our increasing exposure to images of desirable foods (what is often labelled 'food porn', or 'gastroporn') via digital interfaces might be having, and ask whether it might not inadvertently be exacerbating our desire for food (what we call 'visual hunger'). We review the growing body of cognitive neuroscience research demonstrating the profound effect that viewing such images can have on neural activity, physiological and psychological responses, and visual attention, especially in the 'hungry' brain.

[Food behaviour and obesity: insights from decision neuroscience]. / Apport des « neurosciences de la décision ¼ à l'étude des comportements alimentaires et de l'obésité - Imagerie et cognition (10).

Neuroimaging allows to estimate brain activity when individuals are doing something. The location and intensity of this estimated activity provides information on the dynamics and processes that guide choice behaviour and associated actions that should be considered a complement to behavioural studies. Decision neuroscience therefore sheds new light on whether the brain evaluates and compares alternatives when decisions are made, or if other processes are at stake. This work helped to demonstrate that the situations faced by individuals (risky, uncertain, delayed in time) do not all have the same (behavioural) complexity, and are not underlined by activity in the cerebral networks. Taking into account brain dynamics of people (suffering from obesity or not) when making food consumption decisions might allow for improved strategies in public health prevention, far from the rational choice theory promoted by neoclassical economics.

Infección vaginal por el virus del papiloma humano / Vaginal infection for human papilloma virus

Se estudiaron 25 mujeres con lesiones papilares de vagina en el servicio de ginecología y reproducción humana Hospital Carlos J Bello de la Cruz Roja Venezolana, entre octubre de 1996 y diciembre de 1997. Se tomaron dos muestras de dicha lesión, una de ellas para determinar la presencia de algunas de las secuencias de ADN asociadas al virus 6,11,16,18,31.33 ó 35 mediante la técnica de reacción en cadena de la polimerasa y la otra fue procesada por antomía patológica según la metodología tradicional. Once muestra de total pacientes estudiadas coincidieron con el diagnóstico histológico sugestivo de infección por el virus (44 por ciento). En 8 de las muestras estudiadas (32por ciento), se encontró la presencia de alguna de las secuencias de ADN asociadas a los tipos de virus anteriormente nombrados. De las 11 biopsias sugestivas de infección por el virus 3 resultaron positivas para ADN del virus (27 por ciento). De las 8 biopsias donde se encontró presencia de alguna de las secuencias de ADN estudiadas, 3 (38 por ciento) coincidieron con el diagnóstico histológico sugestivo de infección. La citología ex-endocervical resultó negativa, en todas las muestras para la sospecha de infección en el virus