Consumers often have to wait during the process of acquiring and consuming many products and services. These waiting experiences are typically negative and have been known to affect customers¡¦ overall satisfaction with the product or service. To better manage these waiting experiences, many firms have instituted a variety of programs to reduce the actual duration of the wait. However, consumers are influenced by their perceptions of the waiting duration, not the actual one. Therefore, understanding how consumers perceive their waiting time is particularly important in the marketing of service. In this paper, I use laboratory experiment method and examine the impact of mood, distance to the goal state, and filled mechanism on consumers¡¦ perceptions of waiting time and their affective responses. A total of 206 students recruited at the university participated in the study. The results demonstrate that people in a positive mood tend to perceive shorter duration of the wait than those in a negative mood. Further, the distance to the goal state, i.e. the stage at which the delay occurs during the service encounter, has the impacts on consumers¡¦ time perception and affective responses. The delay produced longer time estimates and stronger affective responses at further from the goal state than at closer to the goal state. And filling time resulted in shorter time perception and less negative emotions. However, the relevance to the service of filled mechanism will not affect consumers¡¦ time estimates but only consumers¡¦ positive affective responses. The distance to the goal and different kind of filled mechanism have an interactive effect only on the time perceptions. Moreover, consumers¡¦ involvements toward service and time style have moderating effects. The higher the involvement, the longer the time estimates and the more negative responses. Qualitative subjects perceived longer waiting time, and quantitative ones have more positive affective responses.

Thesis supervisor: Shaun P. Vecera. Includes bibliographic references (p. 111-116).

Thesis (M.A.)--Central Connecticut State University, 2001. / Thesis advisor: James Conway. " ... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 30-33). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 1974. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-78).

Time deficit in people with ADHD has been consistently found, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. The present study aimed to investigate whether divided attention and selective attention are the causes for the deficit; and whether duration judgment performance was related to everyday temporal behaviour. 20 children with ADHD and 23 control children (mean age = 9 years 5 months) matched on age and IQ with no significant difference in working memory were tested. Experiment 1 used retrospective and prospective paradigms with arithmetic tasks. We compared time reproduction and arithmetic performances of the two groups across paradigms and found the expected interaction on the arithmetic performance but not the main effects of group or paradigm, and the interaction on time reproduction. Experiment 2 consisted of different event structures with simple motor tasks. We compared time reproduction of the two groups across structures and found the expected main effect of group and interaction effect but not main effect of structures. Furthermore, our results only provided limited support for the relationship between duration judgment and everyday temporal behaviour. The present findings suggest that aspects of attention remains promising as potential causes for time deficit in ADHD. / published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

This thesis is concerned with the perception of time in music with emphasis on tempo, emotion and time perception in music. Three studies were conducted to assess whether listeners were able to make consistent judgements about tempo that varied from piece to piece. Listeners heard short extracts of Scottish music played at a range of tempi and were asked to make a two alternative forced choice of 'too fast' or 'too slow' for each extract. The responses for each study were plotted as proportion too fast responses as a function of tempo for each piece, and cumulative normal curves were fitted to each data set. The point where these curves cross 0.5 is the tempo at which the music sounds right to the listeners, referred to as the optimal tempo. The results from each study show that listeners are capable of making consistent tempo judgements and that the optimal tempo varies across extracts. The results also revealed that rhythm plays a role, but not the only role in making temporal judgements. In the previous studies, it is possible that listeners might be using an average tempo from previously heard extracts to make every subsequent response. We wanted to assess this by presenting a single stimulus per participant and therefore remove any effects of the context on participant's responses. Using this technique we shall show that listeners can make 'too fast' and 'too slow' responses that are independent of previously heard extracts. In addition the data reveal similar results to those found in the first experimental chapter. The 3rd chapter deals with the effect of changes in the tempo of music on the perception of happy and sadness. Listeners heard short extracts of music that varied in tempo and were asked to make a 2AFC of happy or sad for each extract. Separate psychometric functions were obtained for each extract of music, and the points where these crossed 83% and 17% happy were calculated, and treated as happy tempo and sad tempo respectively. The results show that most extracts can be perceived as both happy and sad just by varying the tempo. However, the tempo at which extracts become happy or sad varies widely from extract to extract. We show that the sad and happy tempi are related to the size of the intervals (pitch changes) in the extract. In considering what might be involved in the perception of time in music we wanted to assess what effect small changes to a stimulus would have on perceived duration. We presented 2 auditory stimuli and show that the perceived duration of the test stimulus with a change in pitch increased as the size of the pitch change increased. The results are explained in terms of event strength where strong events cause perceived duration to increase whilst weak events are perceived to be shorter by comparison.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 1974. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-78).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1966. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-82).