Concort

Concort

Consumer competence training

As part of CONCORT, VicarVision will expolore whether emotion regulation is at the core of consumer competence. The project explores uses cases for FaceReader, VicarVision’s state-of-the-art system to automatically code adult faces as well as improving and expanding the capabilities of that system

Consumer Competence – Resisting Temptations:
Emotion Regulation and Facial Expressions & Advertising Research.

Consumers are continuously exposed to persuasive communication that tries to make emotional appeals. Ultimately the goal of ads and sales pitches is to elicit desire or fear. The current project aims to explore the emotional characteristics of consumer competence. Competent consumers should be able to resist persuasive emotional appeals, at least long enough to evaluate the long-term desirability of the products offered. The current project tests whether emotion regulation is at the core of consumer competence. Persuasive messages elicit emotions of interest and curiosity in all consumers, but competent consumers succeed in moderating the transition to message induced emotions, helping them to entertain reservation. We will measure spontaneously occurring emotion regulation at the exposure to persuasive communication. We will also experimentally manipulate emotion regulation and examine the consequences for consumer decisions. Importantly, this project also extends a technological program to measure emotions on the basis of online computer vision analysis of the face (FaceReader).

VicarVision has received funding to host a Marie Curie Research Fellow within a CONsumer COmpetence Research Training (CONCORT) Marie Curie Initial Training Network. The project is funded by People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ under REA grant agreement n° 290255.

CONCORT – MC INT Research Fellow in VicarVision

Dhr. P. (Peter) Lewinski, MSc was hired in 2012 as Marie Curie Research Fellow in VicarVision. Subsequently he became a PhD candidate (2012-2015) in Persuasive Communication at Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences – University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His supervisors are – prof.dr. E.S.H. (Ed) Tan (UvA); – dr. M.L. (Marieke) Fransen (UvA) and (Marten) den Uyl (Sentient Machine Research group).

He is a certified FACS coder and wrote his master thesis about facial expressions of emotions with prof. José-Miguel Fernández-Dols in Affective Sciences lab from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2009. His academic interests are: facial expressions, emotion regulation, consumer competence, and advertising research.