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Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. In Psychology, persona has been shown to be highly correlated to personality, which in turn influences empathy. In addition, our empirical analysis also suggests that persona plays an important role in empathetic conversations. To this end, we propose a new task towards persona-based empathetic conversations and present the first empirical study on the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Specifically, we first present a novel large-scale multi-domain dataset for persona-based empathetic conversations. We then propose CoBERT, an efficient BERT-based response selection model that obtains the state-of-the-art performance on our dataset. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the impact of persona on empathetic responding. Notably, our results show that persona improves empathetic responding more when CoBERT is trained on empathetic conversations than non-empathetic ones, establishing an empirical link between persona and empathy in human conversations.

Due to consuming hedonic products unnecessary to basic well-being, consumers need justifications for pleasure. However, different justifications have differential influences in promoting hedonic purchases, such as price and quantity promotions (PP and QP), the difference being that the latter requires purchasing additional units to get the same discount as the former. In the present study, even-related potentials (ERPs) was applied to reveal the timing of brain activities to further understand how promotion information consisting of promotion type (PP and QP) and discount depth, deep and shallow discounts (DD and SD) on hedonic products was processed. Behaviorally, consumers were more willing to purchase items in PP and DD conditions than QP and SD conditions, respectively, and spent more time making final purchase decisions in QP and DD condition or PP and SD condition compared to PP and DD condition. Neurophysiologically, DD automatically recruited more attentional resources than SD and led to a higher P2 amplitude. QP and DD condition or PP and SD condition evoked a larger N2 amplitude and enhanced perceptual conflict compared to PP and DD condition. During late stage, PP and DD elicited a more positive LPP amplitude in contrast to QP and SD, respectively, indicating that people have stronger purchase intention and positive affect in PP and DD contexts. These findings provided evidence for the differential influences between PP and QP and what ultimately made consumers buy hedonic products or not.

Studies of smoking behavior commonly use the time-line follow-back (TLFB) method, or periodic retrospective recall, to gather data on daily cigarette consumption. TLFB is considered adequate for identifying periods of abstinence and lapse but not for measurement of daily cigarette consumption, thanks to substantial recall and digit preference biases. With the development of the hand-held electronic diary (ED), it has become possible to collect cigarette consumption data using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), or the instantaneous recording of each cigarette as it is smoked. EMA data, because they do not rely on retrospective recall, are thought to more accurately measure cigarette consumption. In this article we present an analysis of consumption data collected simultaneously by both methods from 236 active smokers in the pre-quit phase of a smoking cessation study. We define a statistical model that describes the genesis of the TLFB records as a two-stage process of mis-remembering and rounding, including fixed and random effects at each stage. We use Bayesian methods to estimate the model, and we evaluate its adequacy by studying histograms of imputed values of the latent remembered cigarette count. Our analysis suggests that both mis-remembering and heaping contribute substantially to the distortion of self-reported cigarette counts. Higher nicotine dependence, white ethnicity and male sex are associated with greater remembered smoking given the EMA count. The model is potentially useful in other applications where it is desirable to understand the process by which subjects remember and report true observations.

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Touch can positively influence cognition and emotion, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we report that tactile experience enrichment improves memory and alleviates anxiety by remodeling neurons along the dorsoventral axis of the dentate gyrus (DG) in adult mice. Tactile enrichment induces differential activation and structural modification of neurons in the dorsal and ventral DG, and increases the presynaptic input from the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC), which is reciprocally connected with the primary somatosensory cortex (S1), to tactile experience-activated DG neurons. Chemogenetic activation of tactile experience-tagged dorsal and ventral DG neurons enhances memory and reduces anxiety respectively, whereas inactivation of these neurons or S1-innervated LEC neurons abolishes the beneficial effects of tactile enrichment. Moreover, adulthood tactile enrichment attenuates early-life stress-induced memory deficits and anxiety-related behavior. Our findings demonstrate that enriched tactile experience retunes the pathway from S1 to DG and enhances DG neuronal plasticity to modulate cognition and emotion.

As a marketing strategy, goods-to-service brand extension has been extensively used for luxury brands. However, little is known about the effectiveness of understanding the neural mechanisms during the evaluation of luxury goods-to-service brand extension. In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were applied to investigate the cognitive processes during the evaluation of goods-to-service brand extension in the luxury sector. First, participants were presented with 2 sequential text stimuli of the luxury brand name (S1) in different industries and the extended service name (S2). These stimuli involve 2 conditions, namely, high-fit (HF) groups and low-fit (LF) groups. Then, participants were asked to decide whether or not to accept the given brand extension. Behavioral data show that a higher acceptance rate exists in HF than LF. Neurophysiologically, LF conditions triggered a larger N2 amplitude and N400 amplitude than HF conditions. Moreover, compared with LF conditions, HF conditions evoked a more positive late positive potential (LPP) amplitude. These results may reflect differences in perceived conflict, semantic categorization, and arousal between LF and HF conditions. These results provide evidence for the brain’s three-stage evaluation process of goods-to-service brand extension and provide neurological evidence for marketing researchers in evaluating preformed luxury brand extension strategy.