Intuition and previous research suggest that creating a compelling online environment for Web consumers will have numerous positive consequences for commercial Web providers. Online executives note that creating a compelling online experience for cyber customers is critical to creating competitive advantage on the Internet. Yet, very little is known about the factors that make using the Web a compelling experience for its users, and of the key consumer behavior outcomes of this compelling experience. Recently, the flow construct has been proposed as important for understanding consumer behavior on the World Wide Web, and as a way of defining the nature of compelling online experience. Although widely studied over the past 20 years, quantitative modeling efforts of the flow construct have been neither systematic nor comprehensive. In large parts, these efforts have been hampered by considerable confusion regarding the exact conceptual definition of flow. Lacking precise definition, it has been difficult to measure flow empirically, let alone apply the concept in practice. Following the conceptual model of flow proposed by Hoffman and Novak (1996), we conceptualize flow on the Web as a cognitive state experienced during navigation that is determined by (1) high levels of skill and control; (2) high levels of challenge and arousal; and (3) focused attention; and (4) is enhanced by interactivity and telepresence. Consumers who achieve flow on the Web are so acutely involved in the act of online navigation that thoughts and perceptions not relevant to navigation are screened out, and the consumer focuses entirely on the interaction. Concentration on the navigation experience is so intense that there is little attention left to consider anything else, and consequently, other events occurring in the consumer's surrounding physical environment lose significance. Self-consciousness disappears, the consumer's sense of time becomes distorted, and the state of mind arising as a result of achieving flow on the Web is extremely gratifying. In a quantitative modeling framework, we develop a structural model based on our previous conceptual model of flow that embodies the components of what makes for a compelling online experience. We use data collected from a largesample, Web-based consumer survey to measure these constructs, and we fit a series of structural equation models that test related prior theory. The conceptual model is largely supported, and the improved fit offered by the revised model provides additional insights into the direct and indirect influences of flow, as well as into the relationship of flow to key consumer behavior and Web usage variables. Our formulation provides marketing scientists with operational definitions of key model constructs and establishes reliability and validity in a comprehensive measurement framework. A key insight from the paper is that the degree to which the online experience is compelling can be defined, measured, and related well to important marketing variables. Our model construct...

Nostalgia is a frequently-experienced complex emotion, understood by laypersons in the United Kingdom and United States of America to (1) refer prototypically to fond, selfrelevant, social memories and (2) be more pleasant (e.g., happy, warm) than unpleasant (e.g., sad, regretful). This research examined whether people across cultures conceive of nostalgia in the same way. Students in 18 countries across 5 continents (N = 1704) rated the prototypicality of 35 features of nostalgia. The samples showed high levels of agreement on the rank-order of features. In all countries, participants rated previously-identified central (vs. peripheral) features as more prototypical of nostalgia, and showed greater inter-individual agreement regarding central (vs. peripheral) features. Cluster analyses revealed subtle variation among groups of countries with respect to the strength of these pancultural patterns.All except African countries manifested the same factor structure of nostalgia features. In Japan, a woman drives past her childhood school and exclaims how natsukashii it is. In Ethiopia, a musician sings a Tizita ballad reliving memories of a lost lover. In the USA, a man smiles nostalgically as he listens to an old record that reminds him of his carefree teenage years. And in ancient Greece, the mythical hero Odysseus is galvanized by memories of his family as he struggles to make his way home from war (Homer, trans. 1921). To what extent are these four characters experiencing the same emotion? Is nostalgia universal?Growing evidence indicates that nostalgia is a self-relevant emotion associated with fond memories (Hepper, Ritchie, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012; and that it serves psychological functions (Routledge, Wildschut, Sedikides, & Juhl, 2013;. If nostalgia qualifies as an emotion and an adaptive psychological resource, it may be pancultural. The present article begins to address this issue by examining the equivalence of prototypical conceptions of nostalgia across a range of cultures. The Universality of EmotionThe universality of emotion concepts has long attracted scholarly attention. Darwin (1872/1965) proposed that emotions evolved as adaptive responses to social living, and thus some emotions should be universal. In contrast, Harré (1986) argued that emotions are primarily cultural constructions and thus should vary according to the meanings and practices of different cultural settings. Although the issues are textured, two major lines of research have supported the universality view. The first line of research has identified universally recognized facial expressions, focusing on a core set of "basic" emotions (e.g., anger, joy, sadness; Ekman, 1992;Ekman & Friesen, 1971;Russell, 1991a). The second line of research has examined conceptions of emotion words (Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, & Ellsworth, 2007; Kuppens, Ceulemans, Timmerman, Diener, & Kim-Prieto, 2006; Páez & Vegara, 1995). This lexical literature has established that, across cultures, emotion (and specific emotions) is a fuzzy c...

covariance structures, mean structures, mixture models, factor analysis,

Comparing factor structures across samples has long been an important topic in psychological research. Traditionally, the congruence coefficient is used to measure the degree of similarity between 2 factor matrices. However, as the congruence coefficients do not have known sampling distributions, it is difficult to assess factor replicability statistically. In this study, a bootstrap procedure was proposed to test factor invariance by examining the statistical significance of 3 types of congruence coefficients. A Monte Carlo study evaluated the performance of the proposed bootstrap procedure. Results provide strong support for this procedure as a powerful tool to assess factor replicability across groups. Two real examples demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method.