Behavioral and neural correlates of emotional intelligence: an event-related potentials (ERP) study

An EEG Study on Emotional Intelligence and Advertising Message Effectiveness

Some electroencephalography (EEG) studies have investigated emotional intelligence (EI), but none have examined the relationships between EI and commercial advertising messages and related consumer behaviors. This study combines brain (EEG) techniques with an EI psychometric to explore the brain responses associated with a range of advertisements. A group of 45 participants (23 females, 22 males) had their EEG recorded while watching a series of advertisements selected from various marketing categories such as community interests, celebrities, food/drink, and social issues. Participants were also categorized as high or low in emotional intelligence (n = 34). The EEG data analysis was centered on rating decision-making in order to measure brain responses associated with advertising information processing for both groups. The findings suggest that participants with high and low emotional intelligence (EI) were attentive to different types of advertising messages. The two EI groups demonstrated preferences for “people” or “object,” related advertising information. This suggests that differences in consumer perception and emotions may suggest why certain advertising material or marketing strategies are effective or not.

The Influence of the Consumer Ethnocentrism and Cultural Familiarity on Brand Preference: Evidence of Event-Related Potential (ERP)

The tendency of customers’ preference to their local brands over the foreign ones is known as consumer ethnocentrism, and it is an important issue in international marketing. This study aims at identifying the behavioral and neural correlates of Consumer Ethnocentrism in the field of brand preference, using event-related potential (ERP). We sampled subjects from two ethnic groups, a Chinese ethnic group and a sub-Saharan Black African group from Zhejiang University. The subjects faced two sequential stimuli, S1 followed by S2. S1 consisted of 40 pictures of 20 Chinese and 20 Black Africans people wearing traditional clothes, and S2 consisted of 40 fake brand-logos which were divided randomly into two groups of 20 each. The subjects were informed that the people in S1 purchased and recommended the products with the brand-logos presented in S2, and the subjects were asked to rate their preference degree toward these logos. The brand-logos were called the “in-group recommended logos” if the recommenders in S1 were the same race as the subjects, otherwise, the “out-group recommended logos.” The results revealed that the race of the brand-logo recommender highly impacted the Chinese subjects’ preference for the brand-logos. The N200 component elicited by the in-group recommended logos were significantly lower than those elicited by the out-group recommended logos. Additionally, there was evidence that being familiar with foreign cultures reduced consumer ethnocentrism. The African subjects were familiar with Chinese people and adopted a Chinese culture, as a result, they did not differ in showing preferences between the in-group and out-group recommended logos.

A review of neurophysiological and genetic correlates of emotional intelligence

The article is an overview of modern studies of brain organization and genetic correlates of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is becoming the subject of more and more attentive study of psychologists due to the fact that it influences the mental development of humans, plays an important role in many professions, and its impairment is a marker of some disorders. Nevertheless, the brain organization and genetic correlates of emotional intelligence have not been studied enough – first studies appeared only in the early 2000s. A review of the literature on the enceph-alographic showed that in rest, people with higher emotional intelligence show greater excitation of the left anterior regions of the brain. When per-ceiving affective stimuli, participants with high emotional intelligence show stronger synchronization of some EEG rhythms. Brain mapping technique made it possible to identify the areas of the brain involved in activities related to emotional intelligence. In regard to genetic correlates of emotional intelligence, some genes of neurotransmitter systems have been associated to this trait: the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene COMT, the dopamine DRD2 receptor gene, the serotonin receptor gene HTR2A, and the BDNF brain neurotrophic factor gene.

Neural Process of the Preference Cross-category Transfer Effect: Evidence from an Event-related Potential Study

In business practice, companies prefer to find highly attractive commercial spokesmen to represent and promote their products and brands. This study mainly focused on the investigation of whether female facial attractiveness influenced the preference attitudes of male subjects toward a no-named and unfamiliar logo and determined the underlying reasons via neuroscientific methods. We designed two ERP (event-related potential) experiments. Experiment 1 comprised a formal experiment with facial stimuli. The purpose of experiment 2 was to confirm whether the logos that were used did not present a significant difference for the subjects. According to the behavioural results of experiment 1, when other conditions were not significantly different, the preference degree of the logos correlated with attractive female faces was increased compared with the logos correlated with unattractive faces. Reasons to explain these behavioural phenomena were identified via ERP measures, and preference cross-category transfer mainly caused the results. Additionally, the preference developed associated with emotion. This study is the first to report a novel concept referred to as the “Preference Cross-Category Transfer Effect”. Moreover, a three-phase neural process of the face evaluation subsequently explained how the cross-category transfer of preference occurred and influenced subject preference attitude toward brand logos.

Neural mechanism of facial expression perception in intellectually gifted adolescents

The current study investigated the relationship between general intelligence and the three stages of facial expression processing. Two groups of adolescents with different levels of general intelligence were required to identify three types of facial expressions (happy, sad, and neutral faces), which were presented with either inverted or upright orientation. Participants' response times and accuracy were measured and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to evaluate neural dynamic processes. The behavioral results showed that high IQ adolescents exhibited shorter response times than average IQ adolescents during the facial expression identification task. The electrophysiological responses showed that no significant IQ-related differences were found for P1 responses during the early visual processing stage. During the middle processing stage, high IQ adolescents had faster structural encoding of inverted faces (shorter N170 latencies) compared to their average IQ peers, and they also showed better structural encoding of sad faces, with larger vertex positive potential (VPP) amplitudes than for neutral faces. During the late processing stage, adolescents with high IQ showed better attentional modulation, with larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes compared to adolescents with average IQ. The current study revealed that adolescents with different intellectual levels used different neural dynamic processes during these three stages in the processing of facial expressions.