Narrow Results

Speculation to the antecedents of an entrepreneurs' superior ability to recognize and exploit opportunities has been prominent in the entrepreneurship literature. Research is now turning more toward the cognitive antecedents (affect). Stemming from the theoretical contribution of Baron (2008), this article tested the ability of positive/negative affect to subliminally prime individuals via a parafoveal vigilance task in an attempt to influence their entrepreneurial cognitions. Through the utilization of both static and longitudinal measures, the findings show that one's entrepreneurial cognitions can be influenced subliminally. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Studies of the relationship between gender and entrepreneurship have shown that men are significantly more likely to start a new business than women. Because an individual's entrepreneurial intentions are shaped by the perceived feasibility and desirability of an entrepreneurial opportunity, these results have generally emphasized how men perceive themselves as more capable of pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities than women. In this study, men have a higher level of self-efficacy than do women regarding entrepreneurial abilities. At the same time, the higher levels of involvement in business planning processes caused women to have a higher sense of ownership in the plan than did men. This sense of ownership is positively and significantly related to the perceived likelihood of success of the new venture. The findings of this study suggest women adopt certain roles and affects in the development of entrepreneurial opportunities that provide alternative explanations to the beliefs-attitudes-intentions-behavior model of intentionality. The roles and affects women adopt during new venture planning may give them superior insights into the likelihood of success of the new venture.

Decision-makers often struggle to terminate unsuccessful new product development (NPD) projects, so that escalating commitment occurs. Although research shows that rational and intuitive decision-making styles (DMS) as well as a decision-maker’s affective state determines the performance of NPD decisions, little is known about their influences on escalating commitment. By applying the affect infusion model in an experimental study, we investigate how a decision-maker’s affective state influence their escalating commitment by focusing on their use of a rational and an intuitive DMS. Our findings, based on 366 respondents, show that a rational DMS is unable to reduce commitment escalation. Surprisingly, an intuitive DMS is able to reduce a decision-maker’s commitment in the case of a positive affect, whereas a rational DMS increases their commitment in the case of a negative affect. Thus, our interdisciplinary research on affect and decision-making extends and contributes to research into decision-making during the NPD process as well as into escalating commitment.

We present the organization of Topic Study Group 34 and summarize the main themes that were discussed during the session. Finally, we outline direction for further research on the topic, as emerged during the TSG work and discussions.

All living systems are dependent on information from the past. While this information may in part be inherent and genetically coded, there was through evolution a steadily growing increase of flexible and individual-specific information encoding, storage, and retrieval. In mammals, and especially man, this biological tendency resulted in a largely environment-stimulated access to information most essential for survival of the individual and the species. Consequently, the remembrance of emotionally and motivationally flavored events was of greatest importance. The apparent result of this is that there is a substantial overlap of those brain structures implicated in the processing of emotional, motivational, and memory processes, a conclusion obvious from the roles attributed to the Papez circuit. How interwoven arousal, attention, mood, and affect are, can most directly be deduced from the assessment of brain damaged patients. Examples from cases with memory disturbances in whom mood and affect influence memorizing as well as some hypotheses on the possible or likely interaction of mood and memory are given.

A neuropsychoanalytic approach to the hard problem of consciousness revolves around the distinction between the subject of consciousness and objects of consciousness. In contrast to the mainstream of cognitive science, neuropsychoanalysis prioritizes the subject. The subject of consciousness is the indispensable medium in which consciousness of objects is inscribed. This has implications for our conception of the mental in general. The subject of consciousness is not registered in the classical exteroceptive modalities; it is not a cognitive representation. On the contrary, the exteroceptive modalities are registered by the subject. Cognitive representations are mental solids (images of objects) embedded within subjectivity. The subject of consciousness is an endogenous state of the body. It is important to recognize that mental solids (including the body-as-object) are no more real than the subjective state in which they are inscribed (the body-as-subject). Also, the subjective state is not without quality. It is conventionally described quantitatively, as the level of consciousness or wakefulness. But it feels like something to be awake. The primary modality of subjective states is affect. Affect supplies sentience in general. Some implications of this approach are discussed here, in broad brush strokes, with particular emphasis on the need for us mental scientists to infer an abstract mechanism to explain both the objective and the subjective data of consciousness generation. (This is dualaspect monism.) I propose that the abstraction we are looking for (i.e., the mechanism that lies behind both the labile neuronal networks that characterize consciousness physiologically and the unpredictability that characterizes it psychologically) is uncertainty. This mechanism (uncertainty) is equivalent to what Friston calls “surprise,” which he defines mathematically in terms of “free energy.”