Extraordinary Experiences Research Articles

Erratum to: There and Back Again: Bleed from Extraordinary Experiences

Erratum to: There and Back Again: Bleed from Extraordinary Experiences

The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife by Gregory Shushan

Our culture allows us to quantify death with precise statistics. We know that at least a million Americans so far have lost their lives to Covid-19. We have the daily numbers of mass killings in the United States; of those killed at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s criminal war; of deaths due to starvation, specific diseases, obesity, psychosis, suicide, and so on. There are new technologies that claim they will be able to predict exactly when we will die from natural causes. And so on. What seems completely absent are platforms that entertain rational discussion of what exactly death and dying are, what they mean. What happens to a person when he or she dies? 
 Why so silent about this fundamental question? It turns out there is a small subculture of serious investigators curious about reports and conceptual issues that speak to this question. Gregory Shushan’s book, The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife is an original treatment of the subject, as wide-ranging in thought and feeling as it is rigorous and scholarly. Heartily recommended.

Understanding the Typologies of Customer Experience in Phygital Contexts: The Case of Webidoo Store

Although research on respectively online and offline customer experiences (CXs) is long-established, scholarly attention in the context of phygital CXs is still in its infancy. The purpose of this empirical paper is to propose a first investigation regarding phygital CXs. The present study contributes to CX literature by investigating the typologies of CX in phygital contexts depending on the intensity of consumers’ responses and reactions to stimuli, i.e., ordinary to extraordinary experiences. From a managerial perspective, this research helps business managers and owners go beyond the CX's subjectivity and contextuality, focusing on their controlled stimuli and touchpoints to trigger the intended CX. Keywords: Phygital customer experience; ordinary experience; extraordinary experience; physical store; Try & Buy; single-case study

Deriving happiness through extraordinary or ordinary brand experiences in times of COVID-19 threat.

The authors examined how the joint effect of brand experience type (ordinary vs. extraordinary) and COVID‐19 threat on consumer happiness changed at different stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic. The findings from five studies, with the COVID‐19 threat and lockdown status measured as well as manipulated, suggest that COVID‐19 threat exerts converse moderating influences on the extraordinariness–happiness relationship under no lockdown and lockdown. Under lockdown, threat attenuates the effect of brand extraordinariness on happiness; extraordinary brand experiences bring more happiness than ordinary brand experiences when the perceived threat of COVID‐19 is low, but consumers derive comparable happiness from extraordinary and ordinary experiences when perceived threat is high. Under no lockdown, threat amplifies the positive effect of extraordinariness on happiness. Consumers rarely experience a large‐scale lockdown due to a pandemic, and this research advances understanding of how consumer happiness from a brand experience changes with the trajectory of a pandemic.

The Parasite. The eschatology of physicality [Az élősködő. A testiség eszkhatológiája

It is rare indeed to be able to thank a living author for an extraordinary textual experience. For this kind of textual experience, I require a certain sort of linguistic intellectuality, modelled most closely on the logical cohesion of philosophical texts. Here, the way this is achieved is that while the object being expressed is absolutely complicated, and the language used to express it is not simple either, it nonetheless goes through, piece by piece - or possibly through several, criss-crossing strands - the thought that is thus transformed into image; it does so with a linearity that never frays

My Father and W. B. Yeats

My Father and W. B. Yeats Monica Macansantos (bio) For Francis C. Macansantos My father was a regular listener of Jaime Licauco’s “Inner Mind on Radio,” which aired in the evenings when I was growing up in the Philippines. I have distinct memories of Licauco’s deep, velvety voice ushering itself into our brightly lit kitchen as my father settled into a chair after having done the dishes. Sometimes, he’d ask me to sit with him at our kitchen table as the famous paranormal expert told stories about a woman whose late father sent her a message from beyond the grave through her son, or about a man who felt himself rising from bed before catching a glimpse of his own slumbering body from where he stood. “Didn’t this happen to you once?” my father would ask me, referring to that time in high school when I had gone on a strange, slow-motion tour of my own bedroom as I remained asleep in bed. He was convinced that I had experienced an astral projection, explaining this phenomenon to me with the same conviction that Jaime Licauco’s voice carried with it as he interviewed guests on his show. Our staticky radio coated their tales of out-of-body experiences and ghostly apparitions in a grainy, reverential film, and my father would repeat these stories to me in awestruck tones just to make sure that I could follow. Not once did I think of questioning my father or this old man on the radio. I was pulled in by the current of wonderment that filled our kitchen, carrying us away from the ordinariness of the room where we sat, in which nothing levitated or gave off suspicious energies. My father’s trust in this old man left no space in my heart for doubt. What made Jaime Licauco seem less like an intruder in our household spouting nonsensical claims and more like a welcome guest at our table was his ability to talk about the extraordinary experiences of his guests as though they were normal occurrences to be expected in a person’s life. His guests would talk about strangers who appeared before them before disappearing into thin air, messages sent to them from dead loved ones via a strange and overpowering scent, and a sudden and passing ability to levitate. He’d listen intently, sharing a similar story he’d heard from a friend or colleague before offering explanations for these events that made sense if one were willing to believe. An energy healer could make one levitate by lifting their hands before [End Page 79] one’s chest while one’s eyes were closed, while a deceased loved one’s familiar scent persisted in the air because one wasn’t listening to their message. My mother teased my father about the ease with which he accepted these explanations—she found my father gullible, susceptible to charlatans on the street who would’ve swindled him of their life savings if it weren’t for her vigilance in guarding him. But there was an earnestness in Jaime Licauco’s manner that made one believe that he wasn’t telling these stories for personal gain, but to help others make sense of unexplainable events in their lives that other people dismissed as mere flights of fancy. One had to trust him when he said these things were real, and for my father, trusting him meant opening one’s eyes to a world that was more magical than what most people were willing to see. ________ When my father died without warning in 2017, I arrived home from New Zealand to see his notebooks and papers scattered in our living room. His reading glasses, mended with a paper clip twisted around the rim, rested with their temples spread out on our phone table, right beside his beloved armchair where he wrote his poems in the early morning. He had just started a new collection of poetry about friends who were long gone, and inside one of his notebooks were the titles of poems he had intended to write at the top of each page, such as “The Campus of...

Luto do consumidor: entendendo como os consumidores lidam com a perda de experiências extraordinárias

Abstract Despite the interest in the role of consumption in the bereavement process, the concept of consumer grief and the process consumers experience when grieving remain undertheorized. This article aims to conceptualize consumer grief considering the disruption brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to understand how consumers respond to this scenario, understanding the mechanisms consumers create to deal with loss. In view of the importance of extraordinary experiences due to their embodied, social, and transformational power, in this netnographic study, we explore marathon runners’ loss of an extraordinary experience. Consumers deal with the loss of an experience through a process composed of five mechanisms mediated by social media, which enable consumers to reverse, reframe, and reestablish the experience. The mechanisms of refutation, despair, abstention-compensation, transgression, and acceptance show how consumers behave in different moments of grief, allowing them to build their trajectories in the grieving process, individually and collectively. As a contribution, we expand the literature on consumer grief by focusing on the specific concept of consumer grief, explaining the processes consumers go through when they deal with the loss of an experience. Additionally, we present a collective perspective on the grieving process, shifting the analysis of the grief of an individual or a family unit to the socialization of grief.

Elite luxury experiences: customer and managerial perspectives

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the nascent literature on luxury experiences by focusing on a significant yet understudied segment of consumers responsible for a large share of luxury purchases. Seven in-depth interviews with ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs), who represent the world’s economic elite, and ten in-depth interviews with managers of top luxury brands reveal important features of the elite luxury experience. Not only do UHNWIs seek extraordinary, exclusive, and bespoke luxury experiences, but they are also driven by status affirmation, feelings of entitlement, and the need for distinction. They also experience a privacy paradox, with a preference for ‘selective publicity’. Our findings demonstrate UHNWIs’ strong disengagement from others – even other UHNWIs – facilitatedby elite luxury experiences. This study is the first to shed light on the idiosyncrasies of the elite luxury experience by combining data from UHNWIs and managers who facilitate luxury experiences. The study offers implications for managing luxury experiences directed at UHNWIs.

There and Back Again: Bleed from Extraordinary Experiences

Abstract From reenactments to pilgrimages, extraordinary experiences engage consumers with frames and roles that govern their actions for the duration of the experience. Exploring such extraordinary frames and roles, however, can make the act of returning to everyday life more difficult, a process prior research leaves implicit. The present ethnography of live action role-playing explains how consumers return from extraordinary experiences and how this process differs depending on consumers’ subjectivity. The emic term “bleed” captures the trace that extraordinary frames and roles leave in everyday life. The subjective tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary intensifies bleed. Consumers returning from the same experience can thus suffer different bleed intensities, charting four trajectories of return that differ in their potential for transformation: absent, compensatory, cathartic, and delayed. These findings lead to a transformative recursive process model of bleed that offers new insights into whether, how, and why consumers return transformed from extraordinary experiences with broader implications for experiential consumption and marketing.

Sleep Paralysis and Extraordinary Experiences

We investigated sleep paralysis (SP) with an online questionnaire. Our sample consisted of 380 participants who experienced at least one SP. In this paper, we present the relation of SP to extraordinary experiences, paranormal beliefs, and absorption. We used a German questionnaire, Fragebogen zur Phänomenologie außergewöhnlicher Erfahrungen (PAGE-R-II), to assess the extent to which people with SP have had other extraordinary experiences, a German translation of the Belief in the Supernatural Scale (BitSS), and a German version of the Tellegen Absorption Scale (TAS). Our hypotheses regarding a positive correlation between the frequency of SP and certain forms of extraordinary experiences, paranomal/ supernatural beliefs, and absorption were only partially confirmed. We found an expected significant correlation between the frequency of SP and the expression on the PAGE dimensions “Dissociation” and “External,” but not between SP frequency and the other scales. The group (55%) reporting paranormal experiences during SP had highly significant higher mean scores on the PAGE, BitSS, and TAS. There were also significant correlations between the applied scales and specific hallucinatory perceptions and emotions, which leads us to believe that two main types of experiencing SP may exist: one mainly connected with typical negative emotions and a more external focus of experience, and another characterized by positive emotions and more internally experienced perceptions. This hypothesis requires further investigations.

Joan Heath interviews Suzanne Cory and Joan Steitz: a female perspective of science in the swinging '60s.

Prompted by the occasion of International Women's Day, Joan Heath and DMM reunited Professors Suzanne Cory and Joan Steitz via Zoom to discuss their extraordinary careers and joint experiences in science. They also delve into past and present challenges for women in science, and discuss the role of scientists in a post-pandemic world.

755 Does Military Service History Make a Difference in Outcomes after Burn Injury?

IntroductionThere is little published research on the long-term outcomes of military service members with burn injuries. Military service members are often exposed to extraordinary challenges and adverse experiences that might influence their recovery from a burn injury. Therefore, to better understand the outcomes of service members with burn injuries, this study compares characteristics and health outcomes between burn survivors who have and do not have a history of military service.MethodsData from the Burn Injury Model System National Longitudinal Database (2015-2021) were analyzed. Military and civilian groups were identified by the following question administered at hospital discharge: “have you ever served in the military?”. The database does not identify if military service members were active duty at time of injury. Demographic and clinical characteristics as well as outcome measures at one year after injury were compared between groups. Patient reported outcome measures included: Veterans Rand 12-Item Health Survey (VR-12) physical and mental health, Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWL), 4-D Itch, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Check List, self-reported PTSD diagnosis, and employment status. Multivariate regression analyses examined associations between outcome measures and military service status, controlling for age, gender, burn size, race, and ethnicity.ResultsThe study population included 672 burn survivors, 105 with and 567 without military service history, respectively. Participants with military service history were more likely to be male (93% vs. 65%, p < 0.001), older (55 vs. 45 years, p < 0.001) and have Medicare/Medicaid insurance (46.6% vs. 37.2%, p< 0.01) than those without military service history. Race, ethnicity, education, marital status, injury etiology, burn size, length of stay, burns to critical areas, amputation, and number of surgeries were not significantly different between groups. Regression analyses also demonstrated that none of the outcome measures examined (VR-12, SWL, 4-D Itch, PTSD Check List, self-reported PTSD, employment) were significantly different between groups at one-year after injury (p >0.05).ConclusionsNo significant differences in outcomes were found in the BMS Database between burn survivors with and without a history of military service. Harmonization of these data with other military service datasets will help us better understand long-term outcomes of this population.

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Beyond the gimmick: How affective responses drive brand attitudes and intentions in augmented reality marketing

AbstractAccording to recent research in augmented reality (AR) marketing, AR‐based product presentations have the potential to create extraordinary shopping experiences across the customer journey. However, the mechanisms that drive key marketing metrics, such as brand evaluations or purchase intentions, are yet to be thoroughly understood. Drawing on the Affect‐as‐Information Theory, this study placed affective responses, such as customers' enjoyment and inspiration, at the center of decision‐making and conducted two online experiments to empirically investigate (1) the differences in the intensity of affective responses between AR and non‐AR, (2) the interplay between affective and cognitive responses in shaping behavioral outcomes, and (3) the moderating role of customer‐specific factors (customers' AR familiarity and product knowledge) on affective responses. According to the results, although the affective responses increase purchase and word‐of‐mouth intentions directly as well as indirectly through product/brand attitudes, AR does not per se guarantee more positive affective responses; rather, they depend on the technical implementation of AR features and customers' AR expertise, among others.

Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England by Elisabeth Ceppi

Reviewed by: Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England by Elisabeth Ceppi Richard A. Bailey (bio) Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England Elisabeth Ceppi Dartmouth College Press, 2018. xiii + 276 pp. $95 cloth, $45 paperback Scholars have long described the New England colonies as marked by social hierarchy. From family life to church life to political life (both near and far), hierarchical relationships dominated the lives of New Englanders. Such hierarchies privileged certain segments of the colonial societies—especially whites and males. In Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service [End Page 220] in Early New England, Elisabeth Ceppi explores many of these privileged relationships, arguing that Puritan religious culture and New England economic culture were connected by currencies of obedient service, which included and made sense of the gendered and raced components of the covenant dialectic of New England. Reading the lives and experiences of New Englanders like Elizabeth Knapp, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, and Samson Occom alongside those of Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, Ceppi presents a fresh look at the ways New Englanders of all sorts lived with the demands of their respective covenants. In order to demonstrate her readings of service in early New England, Ceppi begins with chapters that explore servitude within the "little commonwealth" (25) of the family, focusing particularly on the service rendered by children in colonial society. This "lived metaphor" (18) of the obedient child proves crucial to her treatment of the larger "Puritan project" (18). Her notion of "evangelical obedience" relies on the doctrines of humiliation and adoption (29). Once she establishes how these concepts factored into the concept of obedient service, Ceppi then sets out to show the various ways New England Puritans interpreted key biblical passages, such as the parable of the Prodigal Son. These passages informed the everyday relationships of authors like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, both of whom fail to demonstrate true evangelical obedience. Other perhaps less well-known instances become the focus of the rest of her study. Over the next couple of chapters, Ceppi develops some of the ways that servitude was gendered and racialized in early New England. Her close readings of several specific episodes make each chapter work equally well on its own and collectively. The strange story of Elizabeth Knapp serves as the backdrop for her treatment of at least some of the ways that obedient service took on a gendered component. In 1671, Knapp struggled with service to God or to Satan as she experienced a period described by those around her, especially the minister Samuel Willard, as demonic possession. As she analyzes the "drama of consent" that ensued, Ceppi explores the ways that New Englanders attempted to make sense of the strange goings-on in their community, relying on hierarchy, service, and gender (52). While Knapp's extraordinary experience ended up being treated and explained in the context of gender, Ceppi takes a different approach when she examines the extraordinary life of Mary Rowlandson. Upon her captivity, Rowlandson found herself in a "wilderness thick with masters" (86). As Ceppi reads Rowlandson's narrative, she argues that the captive woman's racial difference from her new Nipmuck masters offers a different way of reading the servant-master relationship. This racialization of obedient service continues with Ceppi's treatment of African slavery in colonial New [End Page 221] England, especially in the works of Cotton Mather and the back-and-forth exchange between John Saffin and Samuel Sewell. In these writings, Ceppi builds a strong case that the Protestant "work ethic was a racial vocation" (119). Her examination of these texts demonstrates that this racial vocation served as the foundation for a Puritan "calling of whiteness" (146). This notion of whiteness becomes even more evident as she compares sermons and manuals aimed at enslaved Africans with those directed toward white servants. Such evidence in the servant-master relationship, then, reinforces her description of this racial vocation. Even with sources that have been examined fairly regularly, like Rowlandson's narrative, the debate between Sewell and Saffin, or the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Elisabeth Ceppi offers a...

Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science edited by John H. Buchanan and Christopher M. Aanstoos

This slender volume is the twentieth member of a series entitled “Toward Ecological Civilization,” organized under the leadership of distinguished process philosopher and process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. It grew directly from the 10th Whitehead International Conference, held in Claremont, California, in June 2015, and more particularly from a single conference track (out of the more than 80 making up the program) devoted specifically to various kinds of “extraordinary experiences” (especially, parapsychological and transpersonal experiences) that directly challenge the materialist/physicalist worldview which arose in the 17th century and still dominates the contemporary scientific, educational, and cultural mainstream. The central premises of the series as a whole, the 2015 conference, and the present volume are that postmodern civilization faces life-threatening crises rooted in that impoverished physicalist worldview, that we desperately need a more commodious, life-affirming, and ecologically sound alternative to it, and that Whitehead’s metaphysical vision can help take us in the needed direction. Like Stanley Krippner in the book’s brief Foreword, I am strongly sympathetic to these views.

Blending the Subjective and Objective Realms of Sacred Architecture at the Pantheon: Creating a Comparative Framework for Evaluating Transformative Experiences in Ritual Contexts

This paper seeks to create a comparative framework for evaluating transformative experiences for different types of ritual contexts found in sacred architecture by bridging the gap between the phenomenology of human experience and architecture’s built conditions. The methodology creates a framework for statistical analysis, whereby evidence of people’s actual (i.e., real, lived) “subjective” experiences can be evaluated against the “objective” architectural conditions. The comparative framework is put to the test by comparing the experiential and environmental conditions found at the Pantheon in Rome. Experiential data for the Pantheon is extracted from Julio Bermudez’s large survey database (N = 2872) of “extraordinary architectural experiences” for this study. This data is compared against “objective” graphical architecture analysis using Lindsay Jones’ “morphology of ritual-architectural priorities” with a specific focus on ritual contexts. The quantitative and qualitative data reveals that the Pantheon produces transformative experiences for visitors that are related to the expected outcomes of specific design features. The percentages from the “objective” and “subjective” analysis both rank the priorities of theatre, contemplation, and sanctuary in the same order. This study concludes that built environments possessing a higher presence and quality of “ritual-architectural priorities” are more likely to be perceived as sacred and produce transformative experiences.

The Sound of One Fracture Flowing

In November 2020, Gustavo Ugueto had an extraordinary in-well experience. The source of his amazement was a stream of fiber-optic data measuring how fractures were altered by slight pressure changes during production. When the principal petrophysicist for unconventional technology at Shell described the Permian well test, he sounded like someone who had used a stethoscope for the first time. “The straining is extended and compressed at all times like breathing,” Ugueto said during a presentation at the 2021 Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTeC) about the test done at the Fracturing Test Site 2 in late 2020 (URTeC 5408). He said it was an “aha moment,” as was getting a good signal considering the infinitesimal differences in the fracture dimensions in a well where the daily pressure drop was less than 40 psi. And he was excited to think about what this test could reveal someday about how fractures change during production. If it lives up to that potential, “we will have the ability to measure. We can experiment. What type of treatment? What type of proppant? We can do more of the good one and less of the bad one. The problem [now] is we have been working blind,” he said. While he was clearly excited about the potential, he also repeatedly cautioned that there is so much more work required to learn what is possible. At this point, the few people with access to this data are like new medical students using a stethoscope, wondering how those sounds related to the patient’s health. “We are at the beginning of journey; it may fail,” Ugueto said. The New Strain The data from the Hydraulic Fracture Test Site 2 are only available now to those who backed the project, but three papers cover the work (see For Further Reading), sparking others to try this new way to measure fractures. “Because of the publications by Gustavo and his coauthors, we are seeing a lot of uptake based on what was learned,” said Dana Jurick, Neubrex Energy Services US—the company that supplied the equipment used to measure the strain data. The company has since been hired for similar work by other oil companies curious about what they can learn from this new diagnostic. The coauthors include Ge Jin, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, who was a geophysics consultant at the Hydraulic Fracturing Test Site 2, and Kan Wu, an associate professor at Texas A&amp;M, who is collaborating with Jin. Her group at Texas A&amp;M is working on modeling aimed at turning this qualitative data source into a quantitative measurement. Ugueto said other operators trying it, including Chevron and ConocoPhillips who were among the test site partners, plus other fiber-optic companies, are getting into a field that is so new there is no settled name for it. Two commonly used labels for it reflect varying levels of optimism about its future. One is based on the data gathered: near-wellbore strain analysis. The other is based on a vision where it is possible to measure how fractures react to change: near-wellbore fracture dynamics.

Factors influencing attitudes and intentions towards smart retail technology

Today, the ever-changing technology development is bringing an impact to the Malaysian retail industry. Smart Retail Technology is one of the outcomes of Industry Revolution 4.0 to deepen integration between digital and physical characteristics that can serve extraordinary shopping experiences in brick-and-mortar stores. Smart retail technology is attaining greater attention in the information system literature. In this study, the researchers aimed to investigate the relationships between perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived enjoyment (PE), perceived risk (PR), attitudes (ATD) and behavioral intentions towards smart retail technology (BI). The 170 respondents were collected through an online survey and processed in the PLS-SEM data analysis. The results indicated that perceived ease of use is the main variable influencing people's acceptance of SRT, followed by perceived enjoyment. However, perceived usefulness and perceived risk performed insignificant roles to link with attitudes and behavioral intentions towards SRT. This study provided some insightful implications for both academicians and practitioners to understand the current situation of smart retail technology in developing countries, especially Malaysia.

The Role of Multimodal Imagery in Life Writing

Life writers describe extraordinary experiences that often extend far beyond the everyday lives of the readers they are trying to reach. How memoirists try to bring their pasts alive in readers’ minds goes to the heart of why they write. Moving readers emotionally requires close engagement that can often be achieved through sensory simulation. As psychologists such as Lawrence Barsalou and literary scholars such as G. Gabrielle Starr have shown, fiction-writers and poets involve their readers by encouraging them to recreate their own past bodily sensations, especially multi-modal sensations (such as vision and touch) that blend as in lived experience. In this study of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, I will examine how two gifted memoirists encourage readers to imagine in several sensory modalities at once. Through expert use of language, Bauby and Trethewey open their experiences to a wide range of readers to share the most acute human joys and sufferings.