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This paper aims to examine the effect of three types of health-related claims (health, nutrition and ingredient) and product healthiness on situational skepticism toward the claims that appear on the front-of-package of food products. The effect of situational skepticism on the purchase intention of the product is further examined.

Two experimental studies were conducted with a 3 (health-related claims: health claim vs nutrition claim vs ingredient claim) × 2 (product healthiness: healthy vs unhealthy) between-subjects factorial design. Study 1 investigates the effects within a single product category (Biscuits) and Study 2 the effects across product categories (Salad and Pizza).

The results demonstrate that situational skepticism is the highest for health claims, followed by nutrition claims and the least for ingredient claims. In addition, situational skepticism is higher for claims appearing on unhealthy products vis-à-vis healthy ones. Finally, situational skepticism mediates the relationship between claim type, product healthiness and product purchase intention.

This study contributes to the field of nutrition labeling by advancing research on information processing of nutrition labels through the lens of the persuasion knowledge model (Friestad and Wright, 1994). Specifically, this study contributes to a nuanced understanding of claim formats on how the language properties of the claim – its vagueness, specificity and verifiability – can affect consumer perception. This study finds that higher specificity, verifiability and lower vagueness of ingredient claims lead to lower skepticism and hence higher purchase intention.

Furthermore, this study incrementally contributes to the ongoing discussion about the claim–carrier combination by showing that health-related claims are better perceived on healthy compared to unhealthy products. Hence, managers should avoid health washing, as this can backfire and cause harm to the reputation of the firm.

From a public policy point of view, this study makes a case for strong monitoring and regulations of ingredient claims, as consumers believe these claims easily and hence can be misled by false ingredient claims made by unethical marketers.

The scope of research on skepticism has largely been limited to examining a general individual tendency of being suspicious (i.e. dispositional skepticism) in health-related claims as well as other areas of marketing. In this research, the authors extend the scope by examining how specific types of claims (health vs nutrition vs ingredient) and product healthiness jointly impact consumer skepticism, i.e. situational skepticism.

Construction enterprises are achieving the goal of production safety by increasingly focusing on the critical factor of “human” and the impact of individual characteristics on safety performance. Emotional intelligence is categorized into three models: skill-based, trait-based and emotional learning systems. However, the mechanism of action and the internal relationship between emotional intelligence and safety performance must be further studied. This study intends to examine the internal mechanism of emotional intelligence on safety performance in construction projects, which would contribute to the safety management of construction enterprises.

A structural equation model exploring the relationship between emotional intelligence and safety performance is developed, with political skill introduced as an independent dimension, situational awareness presented as a mediator, and management safety commitment introduced as a moderator. Data were collected by a random questionnaire and analyzed by SPSS 24.0 and AMOS 26.0. The structural equation model tested the mediation hypothesis, and the PROCESS macro program tested the moderated mediation hypothesis.

The results showed that construction workers' emotional intelligence directly correlates with safety performance, and situational awareness plays a mediating role in the relationship between emotional intelligence and the safety performance of construction workers. Management safety commitment weakens the positive predictive relationships between emotional intelligence and situational awareness and between emotional intelligence and safety performance.

This research reveals a possible impact of emotional intelligence on safety performance. Adding political skills to the skill-based model of emotional intelligence received a test pass. Political skill measures the sincere and cooperative skills of construction workers. Using people as a critical element plays a role in the benign mechanism of “Emotional Intelligence – Situational Awareness – Safety Performance.” Improving emotional intelligence skills through training, enhancing situational awareness, understanding, anticipation and coordination and activating management environment factors can improve safety performance. Construction enterprises should evaluate and train workers' emotional intelligence to improve workers' situational awareness and safety performance.

Research on institutional logics has highlighted the importance of social situations but has not theorized such situations in a way that takes into account their inherent richness, complexity, and unpredictability. Without a theory of social situations, the connection between logics and people’s everyday life experience is incomplete, resulting in fragile microfoundations. Building on Goffman (1974) and the institutional logics perspective, in this essay I sketch an institutional theory of social situations, distinguishing two components of these situations: situational experience and situated interactions. Situational experience is constituted by situational frames – that is, schemas by which a person can perceive others and interpret the source of their agency in a situation. Multiple situational frames are simultaneously present in any situation, offering various potentials for action. Institutional logics shape the content that situational frames take in different institutional orders, providing rules for interacting appropriately in typified situations. However, the actual interactions unfolding in a given social situation do not necessarily conform to situational frames, but rather can transform those frames in unpredictable ways through interaction rituals and frame keyings. I contrast this situated perspective with the cognitivist notion that people “activate” or re-combine pre-existing aspects of logics depending on the situation. I argue that a situated perspective better accounts for the generative and transformative potential of micro-interactions.

This study aims to propose a model of publics' ethical activism, testing the role of emotional outrage in an extended framework of the previously established STOPS model. Thus, this study aims to investigate (1) how ethical perception of a social issue affects situational motivation that leads to participation in public activism, and (2) how emotional outrage plays a role in mediating between situational motivation and activism behaviors.

The study aims at investigating the mediating role of emotional outrage between situational motivation and activism behaviors, which have not been investigated thoroughly in public relations research. By conducting a national survey with 386 people (N = 386) living in Australia, the study's suggestive model was tested in the context of two ethical issues (e.g. climate change and anti-racism). This study found that people who perceive an ethical issue are likely to be motivated to participate in activism behaviors. Specifically, three situational perceptions (i.e. problem recognition, constraint recognition and involvement recognition) were found to be significant factors affecting situational motivation (SM) in problem solving. A high level of emotional outrage was found to play a mediating role between SM and consequential ethical activism behaviors. The more people feel outraged about an ethical issue, the more likely they will engage in punitive behavior. This study contributes to the theoretical development of public relations by illuminating how situational perceptions lead to emotional outrage that promotes behavioral intentions in an ethical context. This study also suggests that a practitioner should be sought to manage the levels of perceptual factors when setting up a communication plan in response to an ethical public crisis.

This study found that people who perceive an ethical issue are likely to be motivated to participate in activism behaviors. Specifically, three situational perceptions (i.e. problem recognition, constraint recognition and involvement recognition) were found to be significant factors affecting situational motivation (SM) in problem solving. A high level of emotional outrage was found to play a mediating role between SM and consequential ethical activism behaviors. The more people feel outraged about an ethical issue, the more likely they will engage in punitive behavior.

This study substantiates how three perceptual antecedents may conjointly affect situational motivation. Also, the findings in this study also contribute to theoretical development in predicting ethical activism intentions. Another contribution of this study is to demonstrate the mediating role of emotional outrage between situational motivation and ethical activism. The authors strived to explore individuals' perceptions and its impact on intention to boycott against ethical problematic social issues. It should be considered that this study used a hypothetical and manipulated situation where respondents are exposed to the visual stimuli that focus on the moral problems that those specific issues have raised.

First, as problem recognition plays a prime mover role in the overall problem-solving process in an ethical context, organizations should reduce individual's ethical problem recognition. When setting up a communication plan, an organization should showcase their positive role in addressing the ethical problems (e.g. to show Adani's commitment to indigenous people and efforts to protect the environment). The response strategy should be effective enough to create an “ethical dilemma,” which refers to a situation in which one has a difficult choice to make between two ethical options.

This study contributes to theoretical development of public relations by illuminating how situational perceptions lead to emotional outrage that promotes behavioral intentions in an ethical context. This study also suggests that a practitioner should be sought to manage the levels of perceptual factors when setting up a communication plan in response to an ethical public crisis.

The paper aims to construct a spatiotemporal situational awareness framework to sense the evolutionary situation of public opinion in social media, thus assisting relevant departments in formulating public opinion control measures for specific time and space contexts.

The spatiotemporal situational awareness framework comprises situational element extraction, situational understanding and situational projection. In situational element extraction, the data on the COVID-19 vaccine, including spatiotemporal tags and text contents, is extracted. In situational understanding, the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers – latent dirichlet allocation (BERT-LDA) and bidirectional encoder representation from transformers – bidirectional long short-term memory (BERT-BiLSTM) are used to discover the topics and emotional labels hidden in opinion texts. In situational projection, the situational evolution characteristics and patterns of online public opinion are uncovered from the perspective of time and space through multiple visualisation techniques.

From the temporal perspective, the evolution of online public opinion is closely related to the developmental dynamics of offline events. In comparison, public views and attitudes are more complex and diversified during the outbreak and diffusion periods. From the spatial perspective, the netizens in hotspot areas with higher discussion volume are more rational and prefer to track the whole process of event development, while the ones in coldspot areas with less discussion volume pay more attention to the expression of personal emotions. From the perspective of intertwined spatiotemporal, there are differences in the focus of attention and emotional state of netizens in different regions and time stages, caused by the specific situations they are in.

The situational awareness framework can shed light on the dynamic evolution of online public opinion from a multidimensional perspective, including temporal, spatial and spatiotemporal perspectives. It enables decision-makers to grasp the psychology and behavioural patterns of the public in different regions and time stages and provide targeted public opinion guidance measures and offline event governance strategies.

Casual online shoppers without a strong intention to purchase items can easily leave web sites within seconds. However, there is little research examining how and why consumers are engaged momentarily when they are exposed to a target stimulus in a low involvement shopping situation. This online experiment study seeks to investigate the possibility of enhancing situational involvement with personal and stimulus factors, namely enduring involvement and perceived perceptual fluency, and to determine how enjoyment contributes to the relations among enduring involvement, perceptual fluency, cognitive effort, and situational involvement, in a low‐involvement online shopping context.

An online experiment was conducted to test the conceptual model. Two mock web sites with different levels of perceptual fluency were developed to test effects of perceptual fluency on situational involvement, and participants completed an online survey after viewing one on the web site.

Structural equation modeling was performed to test the proposed model (n=657). The result confirmed that perceived perceptual fluency elicited enjoyment, which in turn positively affected situational involvement, purchase intention, and cognitive effort. Enduring involvement influences enjoyment, cognitive effort, and purchase intention in a web‐browsing situation. Enjoyment plays a key role by mediating the perceptual fluency effect and enduring involvement effect on purchase intention and cognitive effort. The findings of the current study demonstrated that perceptual fluency of a stimulus could engage people by enhancing enjoyment.

The current study provides an insight into comprehensively understanding how situational involvement can be created through visual information display/web site design as well as a personal factor. The study uniquely approaches the issue of involvement and engagement through internal, psychological process of consumers. Also, the empirical support for the proposed model successfully extends the perceptual fluency hypothesis, contributing to the field of literature.

This study examines the impact of situational and stable animosities on quality evaluation and purchase intention while also testing the moderating effects of within- and cross-country cultural distance. It focuses on the case of the US THAAD missile defense system deployment in South Korea (hereafter, Korea) and investigates how the resulting Chinese consumers' animosity affects their quality evaluation of, and purchase intention toward, Korean cosmetics.

This study utilizes a quantitative approach based on a survey and structural equation modeling. The sample comprises 376 Chinese consumers from 19 Chinese regions.

The results indicate that both stable and situational animosities are negatively associated with purchase intention toward Korean cosmetics. However, their effects on quality evaluation are different. While stable animosity is negatively related to product quality evaluation, situational animosity has no such negative association. Finally, the cultural distance between Chinese regions and Korea strengthens the negative relationship between stable and situational animosities and purchase intention.

The study contributes by better unraveling the effects of stable and situational animosities on perceived product quality. The empirical context is unique because it allows the authors to investigate the relationship between Chinese antagonism toward the THAAD deployment in Korea and Chinese consumers' stable and situational animosities in terms of their quality evaluation of, and purchase intention toward, imported Korean cosmetics. Hence, this study contributes to the literature on consumer animosity by empirically testing the moderating effect of within- and cross-country cultural distance on the relationship between stable and situational animosities and purchase intention.

The study has relevant practical implications, notably for Korean exporters' marketing management and within- and cross-cultural management. The results suggest that countermeasures are needed because Chinese consumers' stable and situational animosities are negatively related to their purchase intention toward Korean cosmetics. Moreover, the findings provide the insight that when foreign firms export culture-sensitive products to a large, multicultural country, their managers should pay attention to within- and cross-cultural differences simultaneously.

Previous studies have shown that the effects of animosity on product evaluation and purchase intention differ depending on the animosity dimension, product type, country and the situation causing animosity, among others. However, the existing literature on animosity has neglected the reality that within-cultural differences in a single large emerging market are relevant to explaining the concept of animosity and its effect on the purchase intention toward culture-sensitive products. Furthermore, none of the animosity studies have touched on the important moderating role of within- and cross-cultural differences between a large and multicultural importing country and a brand's home country in this manner. Therefore, the study fills this gap by empirically examining whether different moderating effects of stable and situational animosities exist for a specific conflict situation caused by a military issue and investigates the causes of these different effects.

This study aims to investigate the interaction between branding strategies, levels of perceived fit and consumer innovativeness on the evaluation of new products from the perspective of situational strength.

Two experiments were conducted to empirically test the hypotheses.

A significant three-way interaction of branding strategy, perceived fit and consumer innovativeness on the evaluation of the new products was found. A significant two-way interaction of branding strategy and perceived fit was also found. Situational clarity fully mediates the relationship between branding strategy and consumer product evaluations at various fit levels.

The theory of situational strength may shed light on the selection of target market when managers launch new products. Innovative consumers are the target market for the new products under new branding or low fit sub-branding; under brand extension or high fit sub-branding, consumers are the target for the new products regardless of their degree of innovativeness.

This is the first work to apply situational strength theory to a new product evaluation context. The theory provides a unified framework for explaining the cognitive processes involved when consumers use and combine marketing cues (i.e. branding strategies and fit levels) to evaluate new products; it also facilitates evaluating how the effects of consumer innovativeness are accentuated or attenuated based on various combinations of marketing cues. Most research on the evaluation of new products has examined the influence of consumer innovativeness, perceived fit or branding strategies as distinct entities. This study simultaneously examined the three.

This paper aims to discuss the findings of a UK-based research study that sought to explore the applicability of situational crime prevention towards money laundering undertaken through the purchasing of high-value portable commodities.

This paper presents exploratory findings from research conducted between 2011 and 2013 in the UK. The research sought to identify the process, steps and vulnerabilities behind money laundering through the purchasing of high-value portable commodities and whether the introduction of situational crime prevention techniques could reduce vulnerabilities in the existing environment.

Despite significant research into money laundering typologies, the use of high-value portable commodities has remained largely untouched, regardless of the increased implementation of anti-money laundering policies and procedures. This paper demonstrates how the purchasing of high-value portable commodities is extremely vulnerable to money laundering – while identifying how the successful application of situational crime prevention is possible – but inherently it depends on various characteristics directly and indirectly facilitating each stage of the money laundering process.

This paper is of value to government policymakers, regulators and financial institutions considering future preventative measures. It is also of value to financial investigators and law enforcement agencies intent on investigating money laundering. While the paper relies on data from the UK, the overall findings are such that wherever cash-intensive businesses exist, so too does the opportunity for money laundering through the financial arrangement retained by such businesses.

This paper presents new research on the direct link existing between high-value portable commodities and money laundering in the UK and the viability of techniques for situational crime prevention despite significant research having previously taken place to identify and develop money laundering typologies.

The present study unveils the service encounter barriers – interactional and instructional – faced by foreign consumers at food and beverage restaurants in China. It builds a conceptual framework and examines (1) how service encounter barriers create situational abnormality, (2) how situational abnormality engenders foreign consumers' felt discomfort that influences their revisit intentions and (3) how expectations disconfirmation moderates situational abnormality.

Convenience sampling using the survey method was employed to collect data from 517 foreign consumers – who stay in Beijing (China) – at food and beverage restaurants. The study used IBM SPSS 25.0 and Amos Graphics 24.0 to analyze the data and interpret results.

Findings reveal that interactional and instructional barriers positively create situational abnormality, which ultimately leads to foreign consumers' felt discomfort and their negative revisit intentions. Expectations disconfirmation significantly aggravates situational abnormality as a moderator.

This study investigates foreign consumers' behavior at food and beverage restaurants in China and cautions its generalizability. It suggests corroborating the foreign consumers' behavioral intentions in the context of other countries to generalize the findings and unleash other factors additive to comprehend their behavior in the wake of restaurant industry.

The extant literature has not examined the service encounter barriers faced by foreign consumers at food and beverage restaurants in China. The present study, responding to the previous calls, incorporated the service encounter barriers and their downstream effects on foreign consumers' behavioral responses. By doing so, it adds value to the domestic food and beverage restaurants and service firms in China, in particular, and paves the way to understand the interactional and instructional barriers in the global context, in general, by engaging the foreign consumers.