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Extant consumer behavior research has alluded to consumer learning; however, little research exists regarding situated learning and its relation to coping with respect to stressful consumption experiences. The purpose of this research is to study situated or in situ learning in two cultural contexts – that of the USA and China.

Online data were collected from non-students in both the USA and China, and structural equations modeling was used to analyze data.

Results demonstrated that situated learning helped cope better with stressful episodes for both cultures. Psychological closeness to the problem mediated the relationship between the antecedents and situated learning for US consumers more than for Chinese consumers.

Since US consumers tend to be psychologically close to the stressor during the consumption process, firms should preemptively inform and educate them about potential stressors to help them learn and cope. However, as Chinese consumers tend not to be psychologically close to the problem, they need to be dealt differently.

This research provides a holistic view of situated learning and coping as a process involving consumers, firms and situations and examines their underlying factors in stressful consumption encounters. It establishes the mediating role of psychological closeness between antecedents and consumers’ situated learning and explores the differences of psychological closeness in two different cultures, that of the USA and China.

The effect of different formats of message delivery has received little theoretical and empirical examination. This research focuses on the effect of written relational communication formats used by service providers. This study aims to answer three questions: Do different formats of written communications (i.e. handwriting and print) influence customer perceptions (i.e. feelings of warmth) of service firms? What are the mediators of these influences (i.e. perceived effort and psychological closeness)? And under what conditions do they occur (i.e. what is the contextual factor)?

One field study and three laboratory studies were conducted to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of format in written communication.

Handwritten messages are more effective than print messages in building relationships in a service context because they elicit stronger feelings of warmth because of both the perception of greater effort and feelings of greater psychological closeness to the service provider. However, the presence of handwriting fails to deliver feelings of warmth when the quality of core services is low.

Service providers can effectively use handwritten communication to signal effort and create psychological closeness for relationship building with their key customers only when the quality of core services meets customer expectations.

First, the research differentiates the formats of written relational communication (handwritten vs print), and links communication formats with feelings of warmth, which is an important factor for impression and relationship formation in the practice of services marketing. Second, based on cognitive-experiential self-theory, this research demonstrates the dual mediators underlying the effect of handwriting (vs print) on warmth: perceived effort and psychological closeness. Third, it identifies the quality of core service as a boundary condition for the effect of handwritten communication.

News research scholars define immediacy as constant news updating, whereas scholars in other fields conceptualize it more broadly as meaning closeness. The present study explicates the concept of immediacy and proposes a multidimensional notion of news immediacy that reflects physical and psychological closeness to the news.

A scale for measuring multifaceted immediacy was developed and tested in a between-subjects design experiment. Four dimensions were extracted from the analysis: transportation, involvement, vividness and timeliness.

The results reveal greater immediacy in online than print news contexts. Involvement is key to the experience of immediacy in both contexts; yet the feeling of being transported to the places of the news events was stronger among online than print news users. The latter relied more on vividness of the news presentation to attain closeness to the news.

Implications of the study were discussed.

Enabled by pronounced advancement in technology, branded apps have dramatically changed how consumers communicate with brands. However, despite the proliferation of mobile apps, brands are struggling to engage users. Without engagement, a mobile app is unable to attract continued usage and brands are unable to establish relationships with consumers. Grounded in construal level theory, this study aims to adopt a fresh perspective to examine the determinants of psychological distance, which plays a key role in branded app engagement.

An online survey with valid data from 396 app users of UberEats, Foodpanda, 7-11 and FamilyMart in Taiwan was conducted.

Perceived synchronicity, localization, homophily, ease of use and design aesthetics are the key determinants that drive branded app engagement, which, in turn, facilitates continuous app usage intention, a positive brand attitude and brand loyalty.

This study contributes to the literature by revealing the five determinants of psychological distance that exert impacts on the establishment of branded app engagement. This research provides valuable findings that practitioners can emphasize to drive branded app engagement.

This research is motivated by the increasing need for international interactions during the gradual recovery of the tourism industry. By recognizing the paucity of research on cultural closeness and accommodation categories, this research aims to illuminate the influencing mechanisms of psychological closeness and travelers’ willingness to book an accommodation-sharing property while booking an accommodation.

The authors employ a mixed-methods approach, including an experiment and semistructured interviews.

Results show that hosts’ higher cultural identity congruence leads to travelers’ higher willingness to book an accommodation-sharing property. Psychological closeness mediates the positive effect of cultural identity congruence on travelers’ willingness to book. The authors further explore the moderating role of room types (entire room vs. private room) and find that the mediation effect is stronger for booking an entire room.

The current research underlines the importance of cultural identity congruence and accommodation type on travelers’ willingness to book an accommodation-sharing property and psychological closeness.

The purpose of this paper is to unveil how family involvement in management teams of private Chinese companies affects professional managers’ psychological ownership and sense of “us”, in the hopes of understanding why their devotion cannot coexist with the higher level of commitment of family managers.

This paper includes two main studies. The first uses regression to analyze survey data provided by 165 professional managers working in Chinese private companies. The second is a scenario experiment in which 106 MBA candidates participate.

The study finds that there is a negative relationship between family management involvement and professional managers’ perceived relationship closeness to owners and psychological ownership of firms. It also finds that relationship closeness fully mediates the negative influence of family management involvement on managers’ psychological ownership.

This paper contributes to both the theoretical literature and management practice. From a theoretical perspective, it connects studies in indigenous sociological psychology with new literature on psychological ownership. The paper finds that personal relationships nurture the shared psychological ownership of managers by generating a sense of “us”, providing a new theoretical explanation for its formation process. Furthermore, this study offers an explanation for the negative signal effect of family involvement in management. From a practical perspective, this study finds that family involvement in management acts as a critical boundary condition for using personal relationships to stimulate professional managers.

This chapter deals with the issue of distance between leaders and followers. I claim that distance from a leader is not only a reflection of time and space (i.e., objective distance) but also connected to followers’ emotions toward the leader manifested in their construal of their leaders. I report the findings of initial investigations that demonstrate how the patterns of construal of leaders as close or distant can be explained by construal level theory as well as through psychological theories of emotions. Finally, I discuss implications to theories of leadership and followership.

The field of service research has devoted considerable attention to the customer’s role as value creator, but there is a lack of research on understanding customers’ psychological processes in value creation. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of psychological distance in value-creation processes. Psychological distance is the customer’s perceived distance from service interactions in terms of spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance and hypothetical distance. Critically, psychological distance influences cognitive processes and can influence how customers think and feel about the service interaction. An appreciation of psychological distance within service contexts can help managers to tailor the interaction in order to facilitate value creation.

In this conceptual paper, the authors build on psychology research and service research to develop seven propositions that explore how psychological distance can operate within service interactions and how this might influence value creation.

The authors divide the propositions into three sections. The first concerns how perceived psychological distance from the service interaction can act as a barrier to entering a service interaction. In particular, the authors consider the influence of social distance and spatial distance within the context of service interactions. The second section examines how psychological distance to the expected point of service use can influence how customers construe the service and the value creation. The third aspect addresses customer-specific characteristics that can impact on value creation by influencing perceived psychological distance toward the service.

Existing research suggests that customers ultimately decide if value is created in the interaction. This paper proposes that perceived psychological distance influences customers’ value creation by examining the service interaction from the customer perspective. The authors suggest that complex context-specific features of the service interaction can be understood by considering psychological distance from the service interaction and from the service itself and evaluating how this impacts on value-creation processes.

From a practical point of view, the paper helps managers to better understand how to manage the service interaction with customers by identifying psychological antecedents of customer value creation.

The paper introduces the notion of psychological distance into service research about value, proposing that the customer’s role in creating value in interactions with the service provider is influenced by the psychological distance to the interaction and to the service offered in this interaction.

This study aims to focus on peer-to-peer accommodation services in the sharing economy. Adopting construal level theory as the theoretical foundation, this study investigates the main and interaction effects of social and spatial distances on guest loyalty toward peer-to-peer accommodation.

This study uses a secondary source of online observational data archived on Xiaozhu, a leading peer-to-peer accommodation sharing platform in China. It consists of 2,612 observations of 1,304 unique travelers who stayed at 559 listings managed by 281 hosts in four major metropolitan areas of China over four years from August 2012 to August 2016. Non-linear binary choice panel models of probability regressions were used to estimate the effects of psychological distances (social and spatial) between hosts and guests on the likelihood of repeat purchase. The software used for the econometric analyses is STATA 14.

The results indicate that social distance negatively affects guest loyalty toward the listing hosts, while spatial distance has a positive influence on guest loyalty. The results also show significant interactions between the two psychological distance dimensions in influencing loyalty. The findings provide important insight into the influences of psychological distances on travelers’ repeat purchase behavior toward peer-to-peer accommodation providers.

This study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence that supports the importance of psychological distances in forming a loyal relationship between hosts and guests in the peer-to-peer accommodation sector of the sharing economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how subjective characteristics of social network sites (SNSs) affect consumers' positive and negative word-of-mouth (WOM) sharing.

The data used for this study were obtained from an online survey with a sample size of 369 consumers. Structural equation modeling was performed to test hypotheses and examine the research questions.

The authors found that the perceived anonymity of an SNS is negatively correlated with its perceived interpersonal closeness of friends, and the number of friends in an SNS is positively correlated with its perceived interpersonal closeness of friends. With regard to positive WOM, the perceived anonymity of the SNS has a significant negative influence on consumers' WOM, and both perceived interpersonal closeness and the number of friends have a significant positive influence on consumers' WOM. But, in the case of negative WOM, only perceived interpersonal closeness of friends has a significant positive influence on consumers' WOM.

When attempting to promote positive WOM, marketers should choose consumers who possess the “right” subjective characteristics of SNSs (i.e. low anonymity, high interpersonal closeness of friends and a large number of friends). At the same time, marketers should monitor the emergence of consumers' negative WOM, especially those consumers who have a high level of interpersonal closeness of friends in SNSs, and respond to the content of negative WOM without delay.

This study investigates the influence that subjective characteristics of SNSs have on consumers' WOM sharing and therefore contributes to the literature on the antecedents of WOM generation and also contributes to the research that compares positive WOM with its negative counterpart.