Search results

The extent to which current relationships with extended kin affect the likelihood that adult family members experience negative life events – such as serious psychological problems, financial difficulties, addictions, or criminal behavior – has received little attention in life course research, which typically focuses on the occurrence and timing of “normal” life events – that is, events occurring in almost every life course (e.g., marriage, parenthood, educational enrollment, employment).

This study used prospective data from a nationally representative panel study on Dutch families. A series of clustered logistic regression models were estimated for the separate types of negative events, while a post-estimation command was used to compare and combine effects across models.

We show that the likelihood to experience negative life events is indeed affected by the relationships one currently has with extended kin. Moreover, by distinguishing different characteristics of family relationships in our analyses, we were able to unravel the mechanisms through which they exert an influence. Current family relationships provide feelings of integration, a sense of meaning, and act as a source of support that can be mobilized if needed.

Given the impact negative life events have on individuals and families, as well as the costs they impose upon society, our results look promising for further advancing our understanding of the risks and the protective factors affecting the development of negative events in the lives of adults.

In this chapter, I investigated how challenges (life events) are negotiated within families according to gender roles and their effect on marriage quality, life satisfaction, and psychological resilience in a nonclinical sample of heterosexual couples (N=159), age 23–78 (M=45.4, SD=11.2), with children (n=127) or childfree (n=32). Specifically, I accounted for the individual’s ability to share “hurt feelings” and foster intimacy within the couple, thus strengthening resilience and improving life satisfaction and hypothesized that the impact of negative life events on both relationship quality and life satisfaction could depend on the resilience levels of each partner and their ratio according to gender roles. Results confirmed the hypothesis and showed significant gender differences in the impact of negative life events on relationship quality, life satisfaction, ability to share hurt feelings, fear of intimacy, and resilience levels. Moreover, the ratio of the partner’s individual resilience affected the dependent variables differently by gender, its level interacted with the age of the couple’s first child (range: 2–54, mean: 21.4, SD: 10.4) and strongly depended on the occupation of the parents.

This study aims to examine the impact of stress as a result of adverse life events on a salesperson’s ability to effectively manage customer relationships. The framework identifies burnout as a key mediating variable and salesperson grit as a coping mechanism.

Survey data is gathered from 364 B2B salespeople and investigated using structural equation modeling in Mplus 8.2.

The findings reveal adverse life events and their corresponding stress diminish a salesperson’s ability to manage customer relationships effectively through the mediators of reduced personal accomplishment and depersonalization. Thus, negative events of a personal nature can have a significant impact on salesperson outcomes and should be taken with the same level of seriousness as job-related stress. Furthermore, results show that salesperson grit provides mixed results as a coping mechanism.

The findings indicate that practitioners should be mindful of the negative impact adverse life events can have on work-related outcomes. Organizations and sales managers must be intentional in managing relationships with their salespeople and strategic in the structure they use to manage customer relationships. Recommendations include the use of regular one-on-one meetings to open up a dialogue about work or personal issues the salesperson is experiencing and assigning multiple resources or staff to service valuable customers, thereby not relying on solitary salespeople.

Employee well-being contributes to firm value; yet, this is the first study in sales to explore the impact of adverse life events on salesperson outcomes.

This paper aims to examine the role of life satisfaction in consumers’ reaction to nostalgic music in an advertisement in terms of attitude toward the brand and purchase intention. It suggests that life satisfaction forms the lens through which individuals interpret and reconstruct past emotional experiences evoked by nostalgia. It further investigates the role of product category involvement in the interplay between life satisfaction and nostalgic music.

Two experiments were conducted. The first study featured a 2 (nostalgic vs non-nostalgic music) × 2 (high vs low involvement) between-subjects design and tested the research hypotheses with 208 consumers. The second study featured two involvement conditions (high vs low) and explored the underlying process behind the hypotheses. Linear regression was used to analyze the data in both studies.

For the low involvement product category, nostalgic music was more effective than non-nostalgic music for consumers with high life satisfaction, whereas non-nostalgic music was more effective for consumers with low life satisfaction levels. For the high involvement product category, life satisfaction did not moderate consumers’ reaction to nostalgic music.

This research suggests that past experiences evoked through nostalgic music are not static but are subject to bias and interpretation depending on an individual’s current mindset. Hence, the eventual effect of nostalgia is determined by how past events are reconstrued based on the individual’s current state.

This paper warns against the blind use of nostalgic appeals in advertising, points to the need to consider the audience’s state of mind, and suggests an opportunity to leverage life satisfaction influencers in designing effective advertising campaigns.

The findings have strong implications for public policymakers. The results are crucial as policymakers often use public service announcement (PSA) to change the attitude of the public toward some phenomena. Knowing the current state of life satisfaction in society, they can increase the efficiency of public service announcements by including a nostalgic song in them.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first one in the marketing literature that looks at the efficiency of nostalgic songs in advertisements. The authors tested the conceptual framework by using two studies and offered novel implications to both marketers and scholars.

The purpose of this paper is to examines the positive and negative impact of service provider experiences on the process of identity adjustment and how they can lead to subjective well-being (SWB). Due to increased life expectancies, people are experiencing major life events during aging (e.g. death of a spouse, serious disease and major health problems), events that lead to identity redefinition.

To gain more insight into this issue, a qualitative study was carried out that involved 37 in-depth interviews conducted with aging individuals who had experienced a major life event such as retirement and/or death of spouse. To apprehend the diversity of consumption situations, the authors investigated daily consumption, hedonic consumption and imposed services (e.g. health and funeral services) due to life events.

The findings suggest that service providers influence consumer’s SWB as regards relationships, growth and purpose in life, mastery and independence and self-acceptance.

The contribution indicates that services play a role in maintaining and/or creating SWB. By segmentation through social roles and facilitating access to services, providers must take into account the processes of normalcy and abandonment (déprise) among aging consumers in life transitions. They must also ensure that they support consumers with the lowest human capital (skills, level of education, income and social class).

Purpose: Risk is a multifaceted concept, and its identification requires complex approaches that are often misunderstood. The consequence is that decisions are based on limited perception rather than the full value and meaning of what risk is, as a result, the way it is being tackled is incorrect. The individuals are often limited in their perceptions and ideas and do not embrace the full multifaceted nature of risk. Regulators and individuals want to follow norms and checklists or overuse models, simulations, and templates, thereby reducing responsibility for decision-making. At the same time, the wider use of technology and rules reduces the critical thinking of individuals. We advance the automation process by building robots that follow protocols and forget about the part of risk assessment that cannot be programed. Therefore, with this study, the objective of this study was to discover how people define risk, the influencing factors of risk perception and how they behave toward this perception. The authors also determine how the perception differed with age, gender, marital status, education level and region. The novelty of the research is related to individual risk perception during COVID-19, as this is a new and unknown phenomenon. Methodology: The research is based on the analysis of the self-administered purposely designed questionnaires we distributed across different social media platforms between February and June 2020 in Europe and in some cases was carried out as a interview over communication platforms such as “Skype,” “Zoom” and “Microsoft Teams.” The questionnaire was divided into four parts: Section 1 was designed to collect demographic information from the participants; Section 2 included risk definition statements obtained from literature and a preliminary discussion with peers; Section 3 included risk behavior statements; and Section 4 included statements on risk perception experiences. A five-point Likert Scale was provided, and participants were required to answer along a scale of “1” for “Strongly Agree” to “5” for “Strongly Disagree.” Participants also had the option to elaborate further and provide additional comments in an open-ended box provided at the end of the section. 466 valid responses were received. Thematic analysis was carried out to analyze the interviews and the open-ended questions, while the questionnaire responses were analyzed using various quantitative methods on IBM SPSS (version 23). Findings: The results of the analysis indicate that individuals evaluate the risk before making a decision and view risk as both a loss and opportunity. The study identifies nine factors influencing risk perception. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that we can continue to develop models and rules, but as long as the risk is not understood, we will never achieve anything.

People with intellectual disability are reported to encounter many negative life events during their increasingly long lives. In the absence of protective elements, these may cause toxic stress and trauma. Given the reported negative effects of such adverse events on their quality of life (QoL), the perspective of older people with intellectual disability themselves may be of relevance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors questioned nine participants with mild intellectual disability, aged 61–88 years old, in four 90-min focus group sessions and thematically analysed the data.

Many recent and bygone negative life events still weighed heavily on the participants. Negative interactions, experiences of loss, lack of control and awareness of one’s disability caused stress. Their emotional response contrasted with their contentment, compliance and resilience. Having (had) good relationships, having learnt coping skills, remaining active, talking about past experiences and feeling free of pain, safe, well supported, capable, respected and involved seemed to heighten resilience and protect participants from toxic stress.

Monitoring and preventing adverse (childhood) experiences, supporting active/emotional coping strategies, psychotherapy and life story work may facilitate coping with negative events and enhance QoL of elderly people with intellectual disability.

Elderly people with mild intellectual disability run a higher risk of experiencing (early) adverse events in life. They are very capable of talking about their experiences, QoL, and the support they need. Focus groups were a reliable method to capture their insights.

Purpose: Social rejection is a negative interpersonal experience that leads to emotional, cognitive, and physiological outcomes. We develop a theoretical model arguing that social rejection in workplace settings can alter employees' personal values in either the short- or the long term. Methodology: This is a theoretical essay based on three theories: (1) human values; (2) affective events; and (3) shattered assumptions. Findings: In the proposed model, an employee's emotional reactions to social rejection in the workplace (emotional distress or emotional numbness) partially mediate the relationship between the experience of social rejection and short- or long-term development of self-protective (rather than self-expansive) personal values. Originality: The processes whereby social rejection at work leads to personal value change remain largely unexplored to date. The proposed model represents an initial attempt to understand this process, including the effects of emotional distress (long term) and emotional numbness (short term). Research Implications: The model introduces the mechanisms whereby social rejection in the workplace leads to short-term and long-term changes in individual values and has potential to serve as a launchpad for future research interest in this phenomenon. Practical Implications: The framework proposed in this chapter should help scholars to understand better the dynamics of social rejection in the workplace and how this phenomenon affects employees' values in work settings, both in the short- and long term.

This study anchoring on the theory of conservation of resources examines the relationship between family incivility, negative rumination and service delivery. This study also analyses the mediating role of negative rumination in the relationship between family incivility and service delivery. This study also examines psychological capital and perceived organisational support (POS) as boundary conditions influencing the relationships postulated in the study.

To test the relationships among the variables, responses were drawn from 419 frontline hotel employees at two-time points and the hypothesised relationships were tested using structural equation modelling.

The structural equation modelling analysis proved that family incivility is negatively related to service delivery. It was also found that family incivility is positively associated with negative rumination and an inverse relationship between negative rumination and service delivery. This study also found support for the mediating role of negative rumination and the moderating roles of psychological capital and perceived organisational support.

This study findings extend the theory and provide guidelines for managers to mitigate the adverse effect of family incivility on employees and their service delivery. Employees and managers can use psychological capital and POS as strategies to prevent the spill-over effect of family incivility on service delivery.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior studies have examined the effect of family incivility on service delivery. By establishing the mediating mechanism and boundary conditions, this study adds value to the theory and practice.