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xv, 145 p. : ill. (some col.) / This dissertation examines the role of affect in consumer judgments in two essays. The first essay explores the use of affect as a heuristic basis for judgments of the risks and benefits associated with new products. Current perspectives regarding the processes by which consumers make decisions about the adoption of innovations maintain that it is largely a cognitive process. However, the four studies that make up the first essay suggest that consumer assessments of the risks and benefits associated with product innovations are often inversely related and affectively congruent with evaluations of those innovations. The results support and extend previous research that has investigated the affect heuristic in the context of social hazards. The findings further indicate that more affectively extreme evaluations are associated with increasingly disparate assessments of risk and benefit. The results indicate that this relationship is consistent across a variety of products and product categories. Together, these findings challenge traditional conceptualizations of innovation adoption decision making and suggest that cognitive models alone are insufficient to explain innovation adoption decisions. The second essay investigates if processing fluency - the difficulty associated with processing information - may serve as an input to the affect heuristic and subsequent judgments of risk and benefit. Recently, Song and Schwarz investigated the relationship between differences in fluency and perceptions of risk. Their results suggested that fluency experiences influence risk perception through differences in familiarity and not as the result of fluency-elicited affect. The three studies included in the second essay re-examine those results in an effort to clarify the role of affect as a basis for perceptions of risk. The findings document a previously unreported reversal in preference for less fluent stimuli and suggest that fluency-elicited affect can explain the relationship between processing experiences and perceptions of risk. The results have important theoretical implications for our understanding of how people derive meaning from fluency experiences and for the role of fluency-elicited affect as a basis for judgments of risk and benefit. / Committee in charge: David Boush, Chairperson; Robert Madrigal, Member; Joan Giese, Member; Paul Slovic, Outside Member

The aim of this study is to investigate family therapists understanding of knowledge, theories and methods in the treatment of mothers who use violence against their children. The study is made on the basis that the operation is not based on clear evidence-based knowledge and examines how family therapists understand and combines existing methods and theories in social work. Methodically the study is based on qualitative interviews with five family therapists in different municipalities in the south of Sweden. A compilation of the interviews gave rise to two main themes: Mothers and violence respective Treatment. The result shows that there are not always explicit methods and theories available in the treatment of violent mothers. Despite this, the family therapists shows a large degree of consensus regarding methods and theories. In the discussion it is suggested that this may be due to some theories and methods are so integrated in the environments that the family therapists are active in that they do not specifically reflect on them. They have, in short, become routine. / Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka familjebehandlares förståelse av kunskaper, teorier och metoder i behandlingen av mammor som använder våld mot sina barn. Studien görs mot bakgrund av att verksamheten inte bygger på tydliga evidensbaserade kunskaper och undersöker hur familjebehandlare, mot denna bakgrund, förstår och kombinerar i socialt arbete befintliga metoder och teorier. Metodiskt bygger studien på kvalitativa intervjuer med fem familjebehandlare i olika kommuner i södra Sverige. En sammanställning av intervjuerna gav upphov till två huvudteman: Mammor och våld respektive Behandling. Resultatet visar att det inte alltid finns uttalade metoder och teorier att tillgå i behandling av våldsutövande mammor. Trots detta uppvisar familjebehandlarna en relativt stor samstämmighet kring metoder och teorier. I diskussionen föreslås att detta kan bero på att vissa teorier och metoder är så integrerade i de miljöer familjebehandlarna är verksamma att de inte längre uttrycklig reflekterar över dem. De har, kort sagt, blivit rutin.

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