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The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a facial photo of female job applicants on employment decisions.

A laboratory or “controlled” experiment was conducted to examine the impacts of job applicants’ facial photos, job applicants' professional qualifications (education level and years of work experience), raters’ gender and college student raters’ academic year on employment-related decisions in a hypothetical situation in the Chinese context. A descriptive analysis and mixed-design factorial ANOVA were conducted.

Significant main effects were found for the applicant’s photo and professional qualifications in the analysis of employment decisions. Significant interaction effects were also found in the analysis.

Discrimination against applicants who attached unattractive photos was more pronounced for the interview decision when the applicants had low qualifications than when they had high qualifications. Although both male and female raters’ ratings of the interview, hiring and salary decisions decreased as attractiveness decreased, it was more pronounced for male raters than female raters.

In addition to financial reporting, more and more companies report environmental, social and governance (ESG) information in emerging countries. This practice is intended to fulfill the information needs of all the company’s stakeholders, and more specifically the investors. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to analyze whether investors include ESG information into their investment allocation decisions in Tunisian capital market. Second, to identify the information dimension having the more effect on their investment allocation decisions.

A field experiment was conducted in an emerging country (Tunisia) among 245 novices and experienced financial stakeholders to analyze how ESG information is taken into account in their investment allocation decisions.

The results of the factorial mixed analysis of variance show that ESG information influenced the investment allocation decisions in Tunisia. In addition, the results of the post-hoc test indicate that governance and social information had more influence than environmental information.

This paper is limited to the analysis of the influence of ESG information only on the decisions of financial stakeholders in Tunisia. In future research works, it will be relevant to study the decisions of other stakeholders and to carry out comparative studies between several countries.

The results can only strengthen and motivate companies to pay more attention to their ESG information disclosure practices. They are also likely to attract the attention of the accounting standard setters on the need to standardize these practices.

The original contribution of this paper lies not only in the analysis of three dimensions of extra-financial information: E, S and G through an experiment carried out in an emerging country, but also especially in the comparison of the influence of each dimension on investment allocation decisions.

This paper aims to examine the effect of religiosity on the degree of auditor independence given the significance of symbolic gestures constructed by client economic conditions in different situations before and after considering the degree of auditors’ moral development.

The paper uses an experimental design based on running mixed factorial analysis of variance (SPANOVA) using mainly repeated measures GLM to test the interaction effects between (and within) variables on auditor independence.

The main findings indicate that there is a significant interactional effect between the degree of moral development and intrinsic religiosity on the degree of auditor independence, given the stimulating effect of the client’s economic gestures/conditions.

The Egyptian economy is growing and ensuring that auditor independence is paramount to sustaining the local, as well as foreign investors’ interest. Hence, this study is very important in highlighting factors that might lead to some impairment of auditors’ independence.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to test the interactional effect between the religious orientation rather than religious affiliation and moral development on the degree of auditor independence, such a relationship has not been tested before in the literature. Additionally and most importantly, it uses statistical measurement through its experimental design, as there is a lack of studies in terms of auditor independence in Egypt. The existing literature follows the perceptional assessment rather than the real measurement of the degree of auditor independence.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a preliminary study based on a novel structured mental health education programme – Innate Health Education and Resilience Training (iHEART) – in a cohort of secondary school adolescents in the UK.

A curriculum-based ten-week programme was delivered by trained facilitators. In total, 205 students enrolled in the study. An additional 64 participants were within an age-matched non-intervention control group. A non-randomised control mixed methodology approach was used. All students, pre- and post-programme, completed a quantitative questionnaire – the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Survey. Qualitative measures were used to assess participants’ perceptions of changes in their resilience and mental well-being.

Those who received the intervention showed a small improvement in mental well-being relative to those who did not, with a similar change in resilience. Qualitative findings regarding impulse control and emotional resilience provided positive findings.

iHEART may be a promising new intervention offering a step change in mental health education for improving resilience, mental well-being and the ability for participants to navigate psychological challenges.

Represents the first systematic attempt to examine the effects of school‐based interventions on children’s self‐reported PTSD‐related distress and coping ability following a series of volcanic eruptions in a sample of 112 children. Pretreatment assessments carried out after the eruptions revealed that time was more of an ally for PTSD symptoms than for active coping ability. In terms of randomly assigned intervention conditions, both an exposure and a cognitive behavioural intervention were found to lead to significant improvement in both PTSD‐related distress and coping ability. In terms of effect sizes (Cohen’s d), the coping scores changed more following the one‐hour intervention than they had during the entire two‐month pretreatment interval; PTSD‐related scores changed over half as much as during the two‐month pretreatment interval. In addition, at four‐month follow‐up, either children continued to improve (PTSD‐distress scores) or gains were maintained (coping scores). Treated children’s PTSD and coping scores were significantly more adaptive than those of untreated children. Finally, multiple regression analyses did not reveal any significant, prospective predictors of treatment responsivity. Includes consideration of the value of self‐report methodologies at the “early gates” of a multiple gating intervention model and the value of collaborations between scientists in the wake of a disaster.

Because presentation formats, i.e. table v. graph, in shopping web sites may promote or inhibit deliberate consumer decision making, it is important to understand the effects of information presentation on deliberateness. This paper seeks to empirically test whether the table format enhances deliberate decision making, while the web map weakens the process. In addition, deliberateness can be influenced by the decision orientation, i.e. emotionally charged or accuracy oriented. Thus, the paper further examines the effect of presentations across these two decision orientations.

Objective and detailed description of the decision process is used to examine the effects. A two (decision orientation: positive emotion v. accuracy) by two (presentation: map v. table) eye‐tracking experiment is designed. Deliberateness is quantified with the information processing pattern summarized from eye movement data. Participants are required to make preferential choices from simple decision tasks.

The results confirm that the table strengthens while the map weakens deliberateness. In addition, this effect is mostly evident across the two decision orientations. An explorative factor analysis further reveals that there are two major attention distribution functions (global v. local) underlying the decision process.

Only simple decision tasks are used in the present study and therefore complex tasks should be introduced to examine the effects in the future.

For consumers, they should become aware that the table facilitates while the map diminishes deliberateness. For web businesses, they may try to strengthen the impulsivity in a web map filled with emotional stimuli.

This research is one of the first attempts to investigate the joint effects of presentations and decision orientations on decision deliberateness in the internet domain. The eye movement data are also valuable because previous studies seldom provided such detailed description of the decision process.

Significant heritage buildings in Europe, and most especially cathedrals and churches in Western Europe, are sites of considerable international tourism appeal. A developing analytical approach termed the orchestra model of experience was used to structure the collection of empirical data about Chinese tourists’ reactions to major cathedral sites in Florence and Milan. These results are used to identify the challenges of meeting not just the needs of Asian tourists but also simultaneously deriving commercial benefits and maintaining the Christian values of the settings. Emphases are placed on the roles of interpretation and the management of protected spaces to meet these goals.

Order picking, the assembly of a customer’s order from items in storage, is an essential link in the supply chain and is the major cost component of warehousing. The critical issue is to simultaneously reduce the cost and increase the speed of the order picking activity. The main objectives are to: evaluate various routeing policies in a random storage environment; evaluate the impact of warehouse shape and pick‐up/drop‐off location; and examine the interaction of the routeing policies, warehouse shape, and pick‐up/drop‐off location under different pick list sizes. The experimental results clearly indicate that the optimal routeing procedure generates significantly shorter routes than heuristic methods. The composite and largest gap routeing policies are, however, significantly better than simpler heuristic procedures. Further testing, in addition, indicates that the shape of the warehouse and the location of the pick‐up/drop‐off point can affect the picking efficiency.

In today’s competitive global economy, the focus is on faster delivery of small more frequent orders of inventory at a lower total cost. This often precludes the use of full pallet picking in warehouses so firms commonly use manual picking of cases and broken‐cases. Many firms increase the efficiency of their warehouses by using zone picking. Zone picking requires that a worker only pick those stock‐keeping units (SKUs) stored within their picking zone. In this paper we examine the configuration or shape of these picking zones by simulating a bin‐shelving warehouse to measure picker travel where SKUs are assigned storage locations either using random or volume‐based storage. The results show that the size or storage capacity of the zone, the number of items on the pick list, and the storage policy have a significant effect on picking zone configuration. In addition, we found that the absence of a back cross aisle also affected picking zone configuration. These results offer solutions to managers looking to implement improvements in distribution center operations.

The study extends the research on visual imagery in advertising to sports marketing. The results suggest that excessive on-shirt advertising is wasteful for sponsorships and harmful for team image. However, a strategy of moderate advertising increases the brand recall rate and does not harm the team's image. From a managerial perspective, this study highlights the risks of excessive use of sponsor logos and provides a framework for determining the optimal level of on-shirt advertising for professional teams.