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The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the conceptual picture of the relationships between the affective and cognitive factors in information seeking and use.

Conceptual analysis focusing on the ways in which the affective and cognitive factors and their interplay are approached in the Information Search Process model developed by Carol Kuhlthau, and the Social-Biological Information Technology model elaborated by Diane Nahl.

Kuhlthau’s model approaches the cognitive factors (thoughts) and affective factors (feelings) and affective-cognitive factors (mood) as integral constituents of the six-stage information search process. Thoughts determine the valence of feelings (positive or negative), while mood opens or closes the range of possibilities in a search. Nahl’s taxonomic model defines the affective and cognitive factors as components of a biologically determined process serving the ends of adaptation to information ecology. The interplay of the above factors is conceptualized by focusing on their mutual roles in the cognitive and affective appraisal of information.

The findings are based on the comparison of two models only.

So far, information scientists have largely ignored the study of the interplay between affective and cognitive factors in information seeking and use. The findings indicate that the examination of these factors together rather than separately holds a good potential to elaborate the holistic picture of information seeking and use.

In the modern era, the significance of product design has increased because customers’ priorities in the evaluation of products have changed from product price to product design. Companies consider product design to be one of the most important sources of competitive advantage and standards for evaluating their performance. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop and validate a new scale to measure product design along with its dimensions.

An extensive literature review and consumer interviews and surveys were conducted to generate an initial item pool. Exploratory factor analysis was used to reduce the initial item pool, and confirmatory factor analysis was performed for measurement validation. A total of four separate studies were conducted for the conceptualization and operationalization of a product design scale.

Using data from three samples, the authors develop and validate a new scale to measure product design along affective, cognitive, ergonomic and reflective dimensions. Furthermore, the results provide strong evidence of the reliability, discriminant validity, measurement invariance and nomological validity of the four product design dimensions. Finally, the effects of these product design dimensions on harmonious and obsessive brand passion were assessed. The results show that the affective and reflective dimensions appear to be prominent for capturing the obsessive brand passion, whereas the cognitive and ergonomic dimensions are capable of increasing harmonious brand passion.

This is the first study that develops and validates the measurement of product design as a four-dimensional construct that can be transferred to a scale and applied across a wide range of product categories.

Rural Australian patients continue to receive inadequate medical attention. One potential solution to this is to train Indigenous Australians to become medical doctors and return to their community to serve their people. The study aims to examine whether Indigenous medical students have a stronger intention to practice in underserved communities.

A sample of Indigenous (N = 17) and non-Indigenous students (N = 188) from a medical program in Sydney was surveyed about their medical self-concept and motivation. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted, group differences were tested, and correlation patterns were examined.

CFA found seven distinct factors – three medical self-concepts (affective, cognitive, and cultural competence), one motivation factor, and three work-related variables – intention to serve underserved communities (intention), understanding of Indigenous health (understanding), and work-related anxiety (anxiety). Indigenous medical students were higher in cultural competence, intention, and understanding. Both the affective and cognitive components of medical self-concept were more highly correlated with intention and understanding for Indigenous students than for non-Indigenous students.

It is important to examine medical students’ self-concepts as well as their cultural characteristics and strengths that seed success in promoting service to underserved Indigenous communities.

The findings show that Indigenous medical students tended to understand Indigenous health issues better and to be more willing to serve underserved Indigenous communities. By enhancing both the affective and cognitive components of medical self-concepts, the “home-grown” medical education program is more likely to produce medical doctors to serve underserved communities with a good understanding of Indigenous health.

Investor risk perception is a personalized judgement on the uncertainty of returns pertaining to a financial instrument. This study identifies key psychological and demographic factors that influence risk perception. It also unravels the complex relationship between demographic attributes and investor's risk attitude towards equity investment.

Exploratory factor analysis is used to identify factors that define investor risk perception. Multiple regression is used to assess the relationship between demographic traits and factor groups. Kruskal–Wallis test is used to ascertain whether the factors extracted differ across demographic categories. A risk perception framework based on these findings is developed to provide deeper insight.

There is evidence of the relationship and influence of demographic factors on risk propensity and behavioural bias. From this study, it is apparent that return expectation, time horizon and loss aversion, which define the risk propensity construct, vary significantly based on demographic traits. Familiarity, overconfidence, anchoring and experiential biases which define the behavioural bias construct differ across demographic categories. These factors influence the risk perception of an individual with respect to equity investments.

The reference for the framework of this study is limited as there has been no precedence of similar work in academia.

This paper establishes that information seekers make rational decisions. The paper iterates the need for portfolio managers to develop and align investment strategies after evaluation of investors' risk by including these behavioural factors, this can particularly be advantageous during extreme volatility in markets that concedes the possibility of irrational decision making.

This study highlights that regulators need to acknowledge the investor's affective, cognitive and demographic impact on equity markets and align risk control measures that are conducive to market evolution. It also creates awareness among market participants that psychological factors and behavioural biases can have an impact on investment decisions.

This is the only study that looks at a three-dimensional perspective of the investor risk perception framework. The study presents the relationship between risk propensity, behavioural bias and demographic factors in the backdrop of “information” being the mediating variable. This paper covers five characteristics of risk propensity and eight behavioural biases, such a vast coverage has not been attempted within the academic realm earlier with the aforesaid perspective.

Many internet users exhibit signs of privacy helplessness and entirely give up online privacy management. However, we know little about what privacy helplessness is, when users are likely to experience it and its implications for privacy behavior. The objectives of this study were twofold: (a) the conceptual explication of privacy helplessness as a novel construct in privacy research and (b) the development of a theoretical model that specifies the antecedents and consequences of privacy helplessness.

A research model of privacy helplessness that contains three subcomponents of privacy helplessness, five antecedents and one outcome was developed. The model was empirically examined based on survey data collected from 589 Facebook users in the USA.

The results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that privacy helplessness is adequately assessed by a three-factor model with affective, cognitive and motivational components. The results of structural equation modeling indicated that these three aspects of privacy helplessness are uniquely predicted by five theoretical factors: (a) prior experience of privacy risks, (b) personal mastery, (c) perceived costs of adaptive privacy actions, (d) perceived rewards of privacy inactions and (e) perceived vulnerability. Furthermore, it was found that helplessness as motivational deficits (and cognitive helplessness via this) impedes adaptive privacy actions, while cognitive helplessness promotes adaptive privacy actions when they do not result in motivational deficits.

This study pioneers investigation in understanding key constituents, attributes and processes underlying privacy helplessness. First, the present study developed the first theory-derived, successively validated measurement model of privacy helplessness. Second, this research proposed a theoretical model of privacy helplessness, specifying antecedents and consequences of privacy helplessness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating roles of organizational spiritual values in the relationship between organizational cycinism and job satisfaction.

The sample was selected by using a convenience sampling method. The sample included in 472 employees from different sectors such as higher education, banking, energy and manufacturing industry. Participants filled in organizational cycinism scale, job satisfaction scale and organizational spirituality scale. Comfirmatory factor analysis and structural equation method were used to detect the direction and level of the relationships between parameters.

According to the mediating analysis findings, organizational spirituality is the partial reason for the association between behavioral cycinism and job satisfaction. Organizational spirituality is also the full reason for the association between affective cycinism and job satisfaction and the relationship between cognitive cycinism and job satisfaction. This means that organizational spirituality decreases the negative effects of organizational cycinism on job satisfaction.

This research is not free from limitations just like others. First, the sampling was limited with only four sectors. In future studies, it can be favorable to take data from all other sectors. The second limitation was that organizational spirituality was the only factor that was used to determine the relationships among the three dimensions of organizational cynicism and job satisfaction. The last limitation was regarding the sample size. Although, sample size that was used in this research was enough to conduct all statistical analyses, extended sample size could be used in future studies.

The results of this research may benefit various stakeholders. While determining organizational spirituality elements in an organization, all the stakeholders’ voices should be included, and their values should be taken into consideration. In addition to this, all institutional employees should be trained about spirituality that exists in the organization, so that all employees will develop a strong bond with other employees and the organization. Moreover, organizational spirituality is closely related to organizational justice. If manager wants organizational spirituality to take root in the institution and eliminate the negativities, it is absolutely necessary to apply organizational justice in each and every matter within the organization.

There have been no studies exploring the mediating effects of organizational spirituality on the organizational cynicism and job satisfaction relationship. Therefore, this paper could be accepted as original.

Besides small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) constraints, there is a lack of critical observations of the human capital model naturally inspiring themselves from within. Therefore this paper exposes the factors of emotional intelligence (EI) that make entrepreneurs gain sustainable competitiveness.

A data of self-administered survey from 397 SMEs in Malaysia was investigated using regression analysis.

The results reveal factors of EI comprised of self-confidence, self-innovation, self-inspiration and self-vision that have significant positive impacts on entrepreneurial performance. Amazingly, EI contributes almost 30% of the success, where self-vision and self-innovation are the robust EI to strengthen and sustain entrepreneurial performance. In contrast, self-confidence and self-inspiration are generic EI of human capital and easy to be applied by rivals.

The study provides a comparative benchmark model for SMEs, managers and entrepreneurs inspiring themselves from within that they can emulate and attain the same success. SMEs can obtain success by investing and culturing EI factors within themselves.

The study provides a comparative benchmark model for SMEs and managers inspiring themselves from within and expands the theory of heterogeneous SMEs and the human capital to sustainable business and competitiveness. SMEs can obtain success through capitalizing human capital attributes within themselves.

The study is the first providing the viable model for SMEs or entrepreneurs leading themselves from within, to their action, behaviour, decision and achievement or the performance mechanism with a benchmark model of entrepreneur EI as a booster.

The aim of this paper is to explore the affective and cognitive factors that condition banking relationships for economically vulnerable consumers and how these factors contribute to increasing financial difficulties and exclusion. This research, performed on a set of focus groups, bases its findings on a combination of experimental and discourse analysis methods.

Financial decisions are not rational and can be biased by affective and cognitive factors. Behavioural finance has focused very little on analysing how consumer biases influence relationships with banking institutions. Additionally, these relationships are affected by the digitalization and transformation of banking business. Thus, in the case of economically vulnerable consumers, who are not profitable for the increasingly competitive banking industry and lack financial abilities, their risk of financial exclusion is increasing.

The results show that distrust and shame lead to financial difficulties in economically vulnerable consumers. Distrust generates problems of access and self-exclusion, while shame generates difficulties of use. This lack of trust makes them more rational when dealing with machines than with people, showing greater banking difficulties for consumers with a “person-suspicious” profile.

This finding can help regulators establish limits on banking behaviour, require banks to incorporate affective and cognitive factors in their convenience tests and detect new variables that can help them improve their insolvency ratios and reputations.

Although many studies have analysed the impact of online factors on the online behaviour of customers', there is also a need to consider the influence of offline factors on customers' propensity for online services use. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how offline factors trigger online continual usage by customers' of airline e‐ticket booking services.

The paper proposes a conceptual model of the relationship between offline factors and customers' online continual usage behaviour. A convenient sample consisting mainly of undergraduate students was selected. The primary data were collected through a pencil‐and‐paper survey, and AMOS 18 was used to test for the hypothesised relationships.

The results revealed that employee‐based service quality has a positive and direct relationship with pre‐existing offline trust and image, and no direct relationship with online continual usage. Surprisingly, and contrary to current literature, pre‐existing offline trust had no direct relationship with online continual usage. However, both pre‐existing offline image and subjective norms confirmed the literature and had a direct significant relationship with online continual usage.

This study used a sample of mainly university students to test the proposed conceptual model. Thus, it might not be possible to generalise the application of the outcomes of this study to different populations.

The results of this study confirm the importance of offline factors as a vital tool that support organisations' attempts to encourage their customers to continue using online channels, which are both efficient and convenient. The paper also offers decision makers general guidelines on managing offline factors to stimulate customers' online continual usage behaviour.

The key contribution of this paper is a conceptualisation of predictors of customers' usage of online booking services, that takes into account the most researched offline factors cited in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the predictors of self-harm in male inmates.

Male inmates with and without a background of self-harm (i.e. suicidal and non-suicidal) were compared across two distal (static and trait) and two proximal (environmental and current/state psychological) domains. The factors from the four domains which may accurately classify self-harm history were also examined.

The two groups were significantly different across the four domains, particularly on psychological characteristics. The self-harm group was associated with childhood trauma, violent offences, institutional misconducts and lower levels of social support significantly more than the non-self-harm group. Being single, childhood abuse, impulsivity, antisocial personality disorder and global psychopathology were the five key predictors that contributed to 87.4 per cent of all cases being correctly classified.

The high levels of psychiatric morbidity and childhood trauma in the self-harm group indicated a need for interventions that address emotional and interpersonal difficulties and optimization of adaptive coping skills. Also, interventions may require a focus on the behavioural functions.

A novel approach was taken to the grouping of the variables. A comprehensive range of variables, was assessed simultaneously, including some not previously considered indicators, and in an understudied population, Australian male inmates. The lower levels of agreeableness, conscientiousness and generalized anxiety disorder which distinguished the self-harm and non-self-harm group, were newly identified for self-harm.