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PurposeThis research aims to reach meaningful insights into fruit consumption motives. The study articulates contextual motives observed through inherent fruit characteristics (i.e. attributes and benefits) with personal motives that transcend the situation (i.e. emotions and cultural values).Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative study used the focus group technique comprising eight groups of eight to 10 subjects (n = 94). The participants were frequent fresh-fruit consumers.FindingsThe analysis differentiates contextual motives from transituational ones. Older participants are motivated by taking care of health matters. They value fruit as an expression of their determination to take action and care for others. Younger participants are motivated by the experience of pleasure. Fruits have a hedonic value related to joy, being refreshing and tasteful.Practical implicationsResults serve marketers and decision-makers to better target motivations for fruit consumption enhancement. These motivations could be implemented by communicating specific fruit attributes that respond to short-term needs. In the long run, marketers could create fruit consumption campaigns that respond to deeper consumer values.Social implicationsDesigning fruit consumption campaigns aligned with individuals' motives could effectively strengthen the adoption of a healthy lifestyle. This study is helpful from the aspect of a public-policy approach expected to improve public health.Originality/valueConsumers' fruit preference transcends tangible product characteristics to motives aligned with their goals, emotions and human values. This path merges two approaches: contextual motivations and the Means-end chain model. The first approach recognises short-term observable product characteristics, whereas the latter works on long-term values.

This study provides some insights into agribusiness involvement on cause-related marketing arguments related to the Colombian post-conflict. We conducted a mixed experimental design with four betwe...

Studies on the effect of music on task performance are contradictory about this relationship’s direction and valence. Task characteristics may be accounting for these inconclusive findings. Thus, this study employs effort to mediate music’s effect on task performance (objective and perceived) under a stressful decision-making process. This is a between-group experiment with three conditions: slow-tempo music, fast-tempo music, or no music. We designed a computer web interface, where participants did a stressful task. Results demonstrated that participants made a strong effort under the conditions with music. Hence, turning the music off under stressful activities is favorable in terms of performance. The article contributes to understanding the interaction between music and task performance, expanding the discussion within a stressful task.

Young Black men who have sex with men (MSM) living with HIV evidence the lowest rates of linkage to care and viral suppression of all US MSM. Kentucky, identified by the US Department of Health and Human Services as a "hot spot" state with elevated HIV incidence compared to the rest of the country, exhibits similar racialized outcomes. Structural, interpersonal, and individual drivers of engagement along the HIV care continuum among people living with HIV have been identified, primarily through quantitative designs. However, the mechanisms by which these factors shape HIV care engagement, and the ways they may combine or reinforce each other, as well as from the lived experience of young Black MSM living with HIV, have been studied to a lesser extent. In this study, a purposive sample of n = 29 HIV-positive young Black MSM (age M = 25years old; 38% retained in care) residing in Kentucky participated in in-depth interviews. Factors that were most influential on engagement varied along the continuum, with health insurance status and knowledge of HIV being relatively more influential to diagnosis, and housing stability, psychological processes, and interpersonal relationships being more influential on retention. For some participants, barriers to care at multiple levels had a mutually influencing and intensifying impact on care engagement. Additional efforts to center the voices of young Black MSM living with HIV will help illuminate acceptable and sustainable interventions for increasing their care engagement and narrowing persistent racial disparities in HIV morbidity and mortality.

Important institutions, such as the World Health Organization, recommend reducing alcohol consumption by encouraging healthier drinking habits. This could be achieved, for example, by employing more effective promotion of non-alcoholic beverages. For such purposes, in this study, we assessed the role of experiential beer packaging sounds during the e-commerce experience of a non-alcoholic beer (NAB). Here, we designed two experiments. Experiment 1 evaluated the influence of different experiential beer packaging sounds on consumers’ general emotions and sensory expectations. Experiment 2 assessed how the sounds that evoked more positive results in Experiment 1 would influence emotions and sensory expectations related to a NAB digital image. The obtained results revealed that a beer bottle pouring sound helped suppress some of the negativity that is commonly associated with the experience of a NAB. Based on such findings, brands and organizations interested in more effectively promoting NAB may feel encouraged to involve beer packaging sounds as part of their virtual shopping environments.

Negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) has been used to treat acute and chronic wounds in a variety of scenarios. Specifically, in autologous breast reconstruction, studies investigating the use of closed incision NPWT (ciNPWT) in breast surgery are lacking.The aim of this study was to analyze the use of ciNPWT at the abdominal donor site following deep inferior epigastric perforator (DIEP) flap breast reconstruction.A retrospective cohort study was conducted over a 15-month period including patients who underwent abdominally based microsurgical breast reconstruction. Patients were divided into 2 groups: (1) a control group that underwent standard abdominal donor site closure and (2) an experimental group that underwent standard abdominal donor site closure plus ciNPWT. Groups were compared in terms of demographic characteristics, perioperative variables, and abdominal donor site complications.A total of 42 patients were identified. Of these, 18 were included in the control group and 24 in the ciNPWT group. No cases of seroma, abdominal bulge, or abdominal hernia were reported. Wound dehiscence developed in 2 patients (11.1%) in the control group and in 3 patients (12.5%) in the experimental group (P = 1.000). One patient (5.6%) in the control group had an infection of the donor site compared with none in the ciNPWT group (P = .429). Interestingly, 3 patients developed hyperpigmentation where the ciNPWT plastic drape was placed.The use of ciNPWT on the abdominal donor site following DIEP flap breast reconstruction did not lower the incidence of wound dehiscence and wound infection. Different approaches are needed to decrease the incidence of donor site complications in abdominally based postmastectomy breast reconstruction.

Persons look for beverages to satisfy thirst (refresh) and feel fulfilled (thick). However, refreshing and thickness are concepts that lack a measurement instrument that captures an accurate judgment of consumers' perceptions. This research aims to propose a tool to assess consumers' refreshing and thickness expectations of fruit juices. Items were developed through a two-stage qualitative-exploratory study, followed by a quantitative study describing the scale's composition using an Item Response Theory approach. Hence, we suggest a set of items to consider when measuring both concepts from a perception task. Moreover, results show that thickness and refreshing are distinct and independent ideas. We provide a theoretical contribution defining each construct and recognizing the attributes that best describe refreshing and thickness for five different fruit juices. Our methodological contribution is creating a scale for each of the concepts. Practically, developing a thickness and refreshing scale is useful for product developers and marketers who expect to satisfy consumers' needs for soft drinks.

The consumption of healthful foods is relevant for the well-being of society. However, understanding healthfulness may be difficult because, in some cultures (i.e., the U.S.), individuals assume that unhealthy equals tasty, an association that does not hold in other contexts (i.e., France). Auditory cues could serve to inform consumers about the expected experience with food and thus could signal the sensory experience of a healthy product. This research contributes to the literature on the use of sound symbolism for analysis of the influence of onomatopoeias as packaging information that influences the expected healthfulness of a bottled drink. The study is a 4 × 4 mixed-model experiment. Grouping was done according to onomatopoeia variables as follows: “Fizz,” “Glup,” “Ahhh,” and control. Beverage color, a within-subject variable, was grouped as green, yellow, red, and control. Results show that the healthful concept is defined in two dimensions: fulfilling and light. Onomatopoeias motivated the experience of a less fulfilling beverage, which had the strongest effect on “Fizz” condition. For the light dimension, “Ahhh” diminishes the perception of light, thus creating the idea that the drink is high in calories. This study reaches out to food industries on the need to find the most consistent and pleasurable sound associated with their products. This will enable food industries to provide information to consumers as well as ascertain how much they enjoy the product.

We report a facile chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of vertical heterostructures of layered metal dichalcogenides (MX2) enabled by van der Waals epitaxy. Few layers of MoS2, WS2, and WSe2 were grown uniformly onto microplates of SnS2 under mild CVD reaction conditions (500 °C) and the heteroepitaxy between them was confirmed using cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and unequivocally characterized by resolving the large-area Moiré patterns that appeared on the basal planes of microplates in conventional TEM (nonsectioned). Additional photoluminescence peaks were observed in heterostructures of MoS2-SnS2, which can be understood with electronic structure calculations to likely result from electronic coupling and charge separation between MoS2 and SnS2 layers. This work opens up the exploration of large-area heterostructures of diverse MX2 nanomaterials as the material platform for electronic structure engineering of atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) semiconducting heterostructures and device applications.

Biomass fuels come from things that once lived: wood products, dried vegetation, crop residues, aquatic plants and even garbage. Lately, there is a constant supply of waste – from construction and demolition activities- in which this waste is generally burned during the chemical recovery process to generate heat. Unfortunately, catalytic processes are difficult to implement for the degradation of biomass because selective oxidation is difficult and these processes produce an unacceptable amount of solid residue like char. Electrochemical processes, on the other hand, have several advantages over catalytic processes, including the use of mildly basic solvents as electrolytes, and control over the rate of reaction and the products. Thus, the electrochemical oxidation of biomass would be an ideal process to utilize this renewable raw material. We have begun to investigate the mechanism of biomass oxidation via electrochemical processes, in which several proceeding chemical or electrochemical reactions are possible. We will present GC/MS data that identify biomass oxidation products. This process could provide an economic way of reducing the organic waste from bio-refinery industries.

Lignin represents a significant waste in pulping mill streams, and is generally burned during the chemical recovery process to generate heat. However, its high heating value results in a bottleneck on the pulping process, and as the only renewable raw material for aromatic compounds, it is woefully underutilized as a heat source. Our work focuses on electrochemical oxidation of lignin-rich streams to generate value-added chemicals of industrial relevance. We have begun to investigate the mechanism of lignin oxidation, in which several proceeding chemical or electrochemical reactions are possible that influence the product distribution and depend on oxidation conditions. Because lignin is soluble in alkaline solutions, we are able to oxidize lignin on inexpensive, nonprecious metal electrodes. We will present voltammetric data that show the potentials at which lignin oxidizes, and will show GC/MS results that identify lignin oxidation products as a function of oxidation conditions (i.e., potential and time). We will present our work in elucidating the mechanism that lignin undergoes during electrochemical oxidation, with an eye toward controlling the oxidation products.