The Effects of Humor on Attention in Magazine Advertising

Abstract

It was the objective of this investigation to determine whether humor in advertising heightens attention levels and whether the potential heightening of attention is moderated by audience confounds. The study utilized Starch readership scores obtained for humorous liquor ads which appeared in magazine issues surveyed by Starch from 1976–1979.

The results indicate that humorous ads tended to out perform magazine ad norms and that these effects are moderated by gender and racial audience composition differences.     

The changing world of women and leisure: Feminism, ‘postfeminism’ and leisure

Since sport is accorded such a significant position within national popular culture, it assumes corresponding importance in producing, reproducing and challenging racial myths. This paper explores how dominant notions of black physicality are embedded in sports practice and how such assumptions may be challenged. To do this we shall offer a critique of existing literature and, importantly, draw on empirical evidence from a recent study of the nature and extent of racism in rugby league. Together these allow us to explore tacit racism, that which is hidden and normalized by language and culture. At the heart of this are stereotypes of 'race' and racial qualities, created by white hegemonic culture with their significance perpetuated by society, including the people who experience the stereotyping. These cultural productions maintain inequalities even after the caricatures they portray may have changed. We examine how these historically specific images are formed and justified (and thereby normalized) and how they have material effects through the actions of coaches, managers, chairmen and players. Finally, we shall review how the sports arena can be used to challenge racist stereotypes to offer necessary, though not sufficient, conditions to begin to change social relations more generally.     

冷战与东欧——近二十年国外学界相关代表性研究及述评

20世纪80年代末90年代初,东欧八个社会主义国家相继发生政治剧变,并自此走上了以建立并巩固多党制为基础的议会民主制、确立并完善私有制为基础的市场经济体制、融入欧洲一体化为转型目标的综合性历史进程。此后迄今为止的20年间,东欧社会主义作为一段完整的历史、一个政治现象,受到了前所未有的关注,并极大地拓展了国际冷战史、比较政治学、社会主义学等诸多学科领域的研究视野。相关成果涉及问题既广且深,不仅包括对东欧社会主义的历史脉络从整体和国别两个层面重新加以细致归理与阐释,还集中体现在利用新解密的多边档案对那些深刻地影响了东西方冷战进程特别是东欧各国以至苏联自身历史演进的重大危机事件进行更为深入的研究。此外,还有基于新材料、新发现、新解读透过东欧剧变对具有普遍意义的一些社会主义基本问题展开的系统反思和理论总结等。本文的要旨即在于对20世纪90年代以来国外有关冷战时期东欧研究的大体情况及主要结论加以介绍和评述,以期对中国同领域的研究提供可能的借鉴与参考。     

Partnership Between Local Government and the Local Community In The Area of Social Policy

The article describes the background and history of one project aimed at developing a strategic social plan in the city of Eger. This initiative was based upon partnership between the municipal government, the local community and civil organizations in Eger. It offers an important perspective upon the potential, in the transitional nations of eastern and central Europe, for public-private partnership as an effective mechanism both to map social needs and to develop policies to address these needs. It also offers one particular approach to the development of such partnerships - the decision conferencing model. Such an approach takes public-private partnerships into an arena beyond that of policy implementation alone.     

Random Recursive Partitioning: a matching method for the estimation of the average treatment effect

In this paper we introduce the Random Recursive Partitioning (RRP) matching method. RRP generates a proximity matrix which might be useful in econometric applications like average treatment effect estimation. RRP is a Monte Carlo method that randomly generates non‐empty recursive partitions of the data and evaluates the proximity between two observations as the empirical frequency they fall in a same cell of these random partitions over all Monte Carlo replications. From the proximity matrix it is possible to derive both graphical and analytical tools to evaluate the extent of the common support between data sets. The RRP method is “honest” in that it does not match observations “at any cost”: if data sets are separated, the method clearly states it. The match obtained with RRP is invariant under monotonic transformation of the data. Average treatment effect estimators derived from the proximity matrix seem to be competitive compared to more commonly used estimators. RRP method does not require a particular structure of the data and for this reason it can be applied when distances like Mahalanobis or Euclidean are not suitable, in the presence of missing data or when the estimated propensity score is too sensitive to model specifications. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.