Chapter 5 covers research on visual perception and related psychological theories needed to fully understand the visualisation process. Cues and heuristics are discussed since they are effortless and quick ways for the brain to support human decision-making. Cues are stimuli in the environment triggering a habitual thought, i.e., a heuristic. On average, cues and heuristics will help shoppers come to sufficiently good decisions, but it is highly possible that in most situations a bit of more effortful reflection would lead to even better solutions. The chapter also goes through how heuristics can be misleading. For instance, if retailers reduce the number of stock-keeping units (SKUs), the ones remaining will more easily enter the awareness of the shoppers since there is less clutter. The fact that more products enter the shoppers' awareness will be misinterpreted by the shoppers who think that the number of SKUs has increased. Furthermore, research shows that colour is the visual quality that the brain accesses most easily and that brightness contrast is the dimension of colour that the brain uses most effortlessly. Finally, eye-tracking and the physics of the eye are discussed.

This chapter traces the formalisation of psychoactive substance use in the early states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Mesoamerica. It explores how mind-altering plants and compounds were embedded in religious, medical, and elite ritual practices, often regulated by priesthoods and royal authorities. The chapter contrasts medicinal use (e.g., opium, mandrake, soma) with ecstatic religious practices and considers how control over such substances became a form of political power. Art, texts, and material remains are used to reconstruct symbolic associations and ritual contexts. The chapter also examines gendered dimensions of usage and the sociopolitical implications of prohibitions and monopolies. Overall, it portrays ancient civilisations as sites of controlled psychoactive innovation and illustrates the deep roots of contemporary debates about access, morality and consciousness alteration.

Chapter 6 covers research about category management. Said simply, category management means a focus on categories instead of on SKUs, and a division of labour between retailers and manufacturers. In category management various categories are said to belong to one of four roles:profile, routine, convenience, and season. A profiling category stands out as quite unique, a routine category is one that all comparable stores stock, a convenience category is perhaps not part of the core categories but that is carried so that shoppers don't have to go somewhere else to find it; and a seasonal category, which is only stocked when at specific times. Other useful ideas from category management are the concepts of transaction builders, traffic builders, and profit generators. Transaction builders are categories that contribute more to revenues than the average category. A traffic builder is a category of items that end up in many shopping baskets. A profit generator is a category that contributes more to the store’s margin than the average category. A category management project is typically organised so that retailers choose a ‘category captain’ (a manufacturer) to represent all the brands in the category. Together with the retailer, the category captain decides on strategies and planograms. A common outcome of category management projects is that profits increase, but not necessarily revenues .

There has been a growing body of research examining the longitudinal course of couple relationships. In this chapter, our goal is to synthesize and critically evaluate the research on long-term couple relationships, highlighting what we have learned and the advances that have been made to earlier work, while being inclusive of a variety of methodological and analytical approaches. We discuss early studies on long-term relationships; research assessing the different pathways of development as well as the antecedents, correlates and outcomes of various patterns of change; and the crucial role of self-help advice and intervention/prevention programs for fostering long-term couple relationships. We argue that although there has been progress in this area, the research still lacks much-needed diversity, and we consider broader limitations and directions for future research.

This chapter positions the 1970s as a transition period before stress became normalised in British society. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s it argues that the public, popular discourse of stress increasingly revealed in newspaper reporting, shifted from perceiving workplace stress as a problem of the managerial class to applying the label of stress to almost anyone at any life stage in any circumstances. However, examination of three case studies of individual accounts of work stress in the early 1970s argues for the relatively limited impact of this public discourse on individual understanding and interpretation of symptoms of stress, among sufferers, colleagues and families alike. It argues that such accounts persisted in privileging physical symptoms and that attitudes towards the stressed continued to focus on the individual’s weakness rather than the contribution of their environmental or social context.

This chapter charts how social changes in housing and gender roles made domestic stress more popularly visible. Initially focused on the wartime case study of Mrs C’s troubled marriage, it examines interpersonal relationships and domestic contestation of time and resources. It argues that growing expectations of privacy and material comfort in the post-war period led to increasing mental distress, particularly when material circumstances did not live up to those expectations. It also contends that the complexities and contradictions of women’s work within the home gave it more prominence as a potential location and cause of stress, particularly within the context of the breakdown of tightly knit, stable communities in the second half of the century. The chapter argues that an increase in the popular perception of stress can be seen in the portrayals of domestic life in popular culture, particularly the New Wave ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

As society continues to change, so, too, has the nature of social connections between people. This chapter, however, focuses on one relationship immutable: that people often maintain committed involvements with particular others. We begin by situating and defining relationship commitment within a modern social context. We review historical and current theoretical models of commitment, including coverage of hypothesized antecedents, emphasizing empirical findings on precursors of commitment since the last edition of the Handbook. We then turn to reviewing research on hypothesized consequences of commitment, again emphasizing empirical findings since the last edition. Recent research considering racial, ethnic, and cultural variations in commitment is also reviewed. We conclude the chapter by offering possible future directions for commitment research.

This chapter is a review of evidence-based relationship education (RE), meaning education to promote healthy couple relationships whose content is informed by the psychology of intimate relationships, and evaluated in methodologically rigorous trials. We describe two broad approaches to RE and their theoretical underpinnings: assessment with feedback and curriculum-based RE. The chapter analyses how RE can be tailored for different stages of the family life cycle and made easily accessible by using different modes of delivery (e.g., face-to-face, online, and via apps on smart devices). The effectiveness of RE approaches and the factors influencing RE effects are summarized via an umbrella review of recent meta-analyses of outcome research. We conclude that future directions for research and practice should include expanding the diversity of RE theory and content to address diversity in culture, life circumstances, and gender diversity of couple relationships; and extending the reach of RE.

Chapter 7 is the first of seven chapters on store atmospherics. The term indicates that the atmosphere is under the retailer’s control, and it is an idea that has been researched for over 50 years. Most research studies on store atmospherics rely on the Mehrabian−Russell model (the M-R-model). The M-R model is a stimulus-organism-response model. That is, it looks at the effect of a stimulus (e.g., the store environment) on the shoppers; emotions that in turn influence shopper behaviour. The effect on the shopper behaviour is indirect since behaviour is altered only as a consequence of the shoppers' shifted emotions. A common way to measure emotions is to use the pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) scale. In a next step, a common way to measure the behavioural outcome is to estimate shoppers' approach/avoidance in terms of how much time and money they spend as well as whether they try to approach or avoid others in the store. Pleasure is typically found to correlate with higher spending. Arousal is often found to amplify positive/negative emotions. Some studies have found support for an optimal level of stimulation where too little arousal leads to shoppers spending less because they are not sufficiently aroused, while too much stimulation also has a negative effect on the shopper’s behaviour.

People enact meaningful personal relationships using communication technologies. The current chapter overviews how technology and personal relationships are intertwined. The perspective of the chapter is centered on how people relate via technologies while recognizing the importance of understanding the technologies themselves and how they are used. The chapter has three main sections. The first examines how communication technologies are integral to relational communication across the course of relationships, and the second considers factors that shape the nature and impact of relational communication occurring via technologies. The third section focuses on both relationships and technologies by considering the contemporary notion of mixed-media relationships, which are enacted via multiple channels, often simultaneously. Finally, the conclusion of the chapter elucidates some key complexities and their implications for future research and theory, including the need to consider both technologies and messages simultaneously and the challenges of analyzing multimodal communication in relationships.

Friendship is a consequential relationship for child development and well-being. This chapter examines recent research on three major themes related to children’s friendships. We begin by reviewing findings from several long-term longitudinal studies documenting the diverse and multifaceted impacts of childhood and adolescent friendship competencies and experiences on later adjustment. We also highlight how these long-term longitudinal studies have allowed researchers to test and refine theoretical perspectives about how early family and peer relationships facilitate the development of skills and understandings that set the stage for social competence and positive adjustment later in development. With this as background, we review theory and research on the processes and provisions that characterize children’s friendships, and then describe important contextual factors that affect children’s friendships, with a particular focus on the school context and how contextual factors can facilitate or undermine the development and maintenance of cross-group friendship.

This chapter lays the groundwork for succeeding chapters in establishing popular understandings of causation and treatment and revealing the considerable flexibility inherent within the overall concept of ‘nerves’. It does this by examining self-help literature from the 1900s to mid-1930s, uncovering contemporary understanding of issues affecting mental well-being, and examining proposed causes, symptoms and remedies. These reveal key themes underpinning popular conceptualisations of stress during the subsequent century. The chapter argues that self-help books represented the opening up of a discourse about the inner self and the sensitive area of mental health and illustrates the increasing reflexivity required to explain everyday life in the twentieth century. Also proposed is the way that such literature both reflected and responded to contemporary social problems, illuminating popular notions of health and well-being, stoicism and personal responsibility.

The ’Introduction’ lays the intellectual foundation for the book by situating mind-altering substances within the broader arc of human cultural, neurological, and technological evolution. It argues that altered states of consciousness — whether chemically, behaviourally, or digitally induced — are not peripheral but central to the human experience. The chapter outlines how the search for transcendence, novelty, and meaning has driven innovations in medicine, ritual, and technology across millennia. It introduces the concept of ’experiential adaptation’ to describe how societies continually modify consciousness in response to environmental, social, and symbolic pressures. The introduction also maps out the interdisciplinary methodology of the book, drawing from anthropology, neuroscience, history, digital media studies, and future forecasting. It prepares the reader to navigate a narrative that stretches from Palaeolithic natural and artificial, healthy and pathological, sacred and simulated.

The Conclusion argues that despite material improvements in both work and home life during the twentieth century, societal changes and a growing popular discourse of stress meant that by its end, people regularly interpreted their everyday woes as stress. The language and terminology deployed to describe what is now understood as stress, were historicised according to cultural and social acceptability and thus physical explanations and stoicism were privileged for much of the century. The chapter argues that after the Second World War, thanks to increasing education, affluence and consumerism, people began to understand and deal with their everyday experiences of work and domestic life differently, so that such experiences became both problematised and the concept of stress popularised. Overall, it argues that stress was and is a mutable concept, its flexibility ensuring both conceptual longevity and, by the end of the century, its apparent ubiquity.