Immoral Character Research Articles

Promoting musical engagement for well-being: the effects of negative contextual information on engagement, enjoyment, and aesthetic response

ABSTRACT Artistic engagement and enjoyment are conceptualized as mechanisms for positively affecting well-being. However, less is known about how negative extramusical information influences enjoyment and/or engagement. We asked if knowing the immoral character of a composer and/or their compositional intent negatively affected listeners’ engagement and enjoyment. Participants (N = 448) read a fictionalized excerpt about Holst’s Mars, with either sexist or neutral composer information, and either sexist or neutral musical intent before listening to the work and completing measures of their enjoyment, engagement, and aesthetic response. We found an effect of extramusical information for listeners’ enjoyment and aesthetic response, but not for engagement. Enjoyment and aesthetic response were higher in the Neutral Composer/Neutral Intent condition than the other three conditions. This study furthers understanding of how extra-musical factors affect the positive emotions music elicits, and impact how listeners interact with music, thus impacting possibilities for enhanced senses of well-being.

Antagonistic but holier than thou: Antagonistic people think they are (way) better-than-average on moral character.

Although clinical psychologists have long speculated that antagonistic individuals may lack insight into their moral deficits, some evidence has shown that more (vs. less) antagonistic people view moral traits as somewhat desirable and rate themselves as lower on moral characteristics (suggestive of some insight). But, we suggest that antagonistic people's struggles with insight can be detected as part of a basic social-cognitive bias that entails believing the self is better-than-average on socially desirable characteristics (i.e., the "better-than-average effect" [BTAE]). Specifically, although antagonistic people may rate themselves lower on moral characteristics than less antagonistic people, they may still believe that their relative standing on moral characteristics compares favorably to others. Participants (N = 515) completed indicators of the Dark Tetrad (D4) constructs (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism) and rated themselves in relation to others on moral and immoral character traits. Overall, participants exhibited very large BTAEs (i.e., rated the self as "better-than-average" on moral character traits); only psychopathy and sadism consistently related negatively to BTAEs, but people with elevations in each D4 construct (or any D4 facet) still exhibited large-to-very-large BTAEs. Such antagonistic participants viewed themselves as possessing substantially greater amounts of moral than immoral character traits but viewed average others as possessing an equal mix of these traits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Impacts of character morality on egocentric projection and identification

Studies in the social cognition literature indicate that several strategies play a role in how observers understand an observed actor, including by simulating the actor's perspective (identification), and/or an audience member projecting their own perspective onto the actor's mind (egocentric projection). In processing story characters, there is evidence that taking a character's perspective and projecting one's own perspective are distinct psychological mechanisms used to understand a character. Manipulating a common and much studied narrative feature—character morality—we examined how morality influences the way audience members process story characters. Three experiments consistently found that audience members tend to have higher levels of both egocentric projection and identification with the character when interpreting moral characters, compared to immoral characters. Confirmatory factor analysis shows that egocentric projection and identification are two distinct constructs.

"These pots we have to wear": A Report on the Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, 31 July-6 August 2022

"These pots we have to wear":A Report on the Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, 31 July-6 August 2022 Talia Abu After a two-year hiatus, brought on by the global Covid-19 pandemic, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation hosted once more its August Workshop. The Workshop has been sorely missed mostly for the unique academic experience it offers all participants, but especially for early-career researchers. While conferences often include parallel panels, the unique format of the Zurich Workshop, which gives every presentation the central stage, allows those in their early careers to receive the same consideration and attentive feedback as well-established academics. It is well known, and well documented, that Fritz Senn encourages participants to avoid reading papers and, instead, to adapt a more interactive approach between speaker and listeners. Speaking straight to the listeners privileges discourse and the exchange of ideas more than the eloquence of a written paper and provides grounds for a stimulating discussion that is less constricted than an unforgiving schedule of multiple sessions. [End Page 575] Clothing, this year's topic, was informed by the prominent presence of apparel in Joyce's texts throughout his career. Jolanta Warwzycka, who inaugurated the formal sessions of the Workshop, traced the beginning of Joyce's personal interest in clothes, and especially in women's attire, back to his years in Trieste. Looking into Giacomo Joyce, she argued that descriptions of ladies' ensembles became more detailed after his encounter with the sophisticated and emancipated style of Triestine women. And, as Emily Bell's attentive and productive inquiry into Joyce's library proved later that week, this interest is well documented in his note-taking from a variety of novels, historical accounts, and encyclopedic works about fashion and clothes. Sam Slote's engaging discussion of hats, which opened the second day of the Workshop, argued for Joyce's interest in the cultural codes associated with particular wearable items. Emphasizing the close affiliation between social status and appearance, Slote demonstrated that Ulysses represents the political downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell through social practices involving hats. He started his presentation, titled "The King Uncrowned (or Men Without Hats)," with iconographic images of Parnell depicted as shirtless and fearless, which illustrated the cultural perception of the Nationalist leader as a brave, strong, and hyper-masculine figure. Following his political downfall, Parnell's image was revised in the popular imagination, as he was depicted as ill-kempt and, crucially, as not wearing a hat, a sign of vanished respectability. According to Slote, however, Joyce does more than simply depict Parnell's transition from the uncrowned to the decrowned king of Ireland; he interferes with the historical record when Bloom brings Parnell his lost hat and, in a gesture of crowning, restores Parnell's kingship. The cultural function of items of clothing was also at the center of Stephanie Nelson's presentation. Discussing veils in Homer and Ulysses, Nelson related the function of the veil in separating an individual from either the shameful or the sacred. According to Nelson's fascinating reading of the "Circe" episode, the veil dramatizes the play between seeing and not seeing, shame and passion, the sacred and the obscene. She also pointed out that the veil, in Ulysses, signals an oscillation between the material and the metaphorical. Thus, when Martha Clifford appears in "Circe" wearing a veil, we are reminded that her identity has never been unveiled and that the mystery surrounding her has never resolved. Swaying from the metaphoric to the material, in relation to clothing, was the subject of other presentations as well. In my talk, I indicated that HCE's "dirty pantaloons" (FW 94.35) signal, on the one hand, his immoral character and, on the other, reflect the material reality of pants stained and tainted by bodily fluids or by soil. I claimed that [End Page 576] dirt on clothes, when not read allegorically, becomes a form of communication and that the incriminating message communicated by the dirt on HCE's pants requires the silencing mechanism of the washing machine. Fedya Daas's thought-provoking discussion of secondhand clothes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses showed...

Sexual assault and fatal violence against women during the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921: Kate Maher’s murder in context

At the height of the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921, 45-year-old Kate Maher was brutally raped. She subsequently died of terrible wounds, almost certainly inflicted by drunken British soldiers. This...

How Do Video Games Elicit Guilt in Players? Linking Character Morality to Guilt Through a Mediation Analysis.

Research has consistently found that committing immoral actions in video games is capable of eliciting feelings of guilt in players. This study aimed to investigate the mediating role of theoretically-relevant psychological mechanisms: Perceived morality of the player-controlled character and self-attribution of virtual behavior. Based in psychological and communication theory, we derived a model that links these variables to character portrayal and guilt. A between-subjects experiment manipulated the portrayal of the player-controlled character (immoral vs. moral) and measured the mediating variables and self-reported guilt. The hypothesized model was tested using a path model. Data were generally consistent with hypotheses. Controlling an immoral character reduced perceived character morality. Perceived character morality positively predicted self-attribution of character behavior and negatively predicted guilt. Self-attribution positively predicted guilt but self-attribution and perceived character morality did not interact. Our findings suggest novel directions for continued research into how game features elicit emotional responses in players.

Development and validation of the good and evil character traits (GECT) scale.

The present study describes the development and validation of the good and evil character traits (GECT) scale. A set of 3,614 good and evil moral character descriptors (i.e., moral and immoral character traits) was selected from a dictionary of contemporary Chinese language and daily life expressions and ultimately condensed into 55 items. Then, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and parallel analysis (PA) were conducted to explore the structure and final items of the GECT with sample 1 (n=350), resulting in 21 good items and 32 evil items. After that, in confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with sample 2 (n=350), the resulting factor structure was confirmed for the 53-item scale (Study 1). Additionally, evidence of validity based on correlations with Honesty-Humility and Dirty Dozen was demonstrated (Study 2). The implications of our findings for the assessment of good and evil characters and further theoretical exploration are discussed.

Morphological Metaphor Mapping of Moral Concepts in Chinese Culture.

According to conceptual metaphor theory, individuals are thought to understand or express abstract concepts by using referents in the physical world—right and left for moral and immoral, for example. In this research, we used a modified Stroop paradigm to explore how abstract moral concepts are metaphorically translated onto physical referents in Chinese culture using the Chinese language. We presented Chinese characters related to moral and immoral abstract concepts in either non-distorted or distorted positions (Study 1) or rotated to the right or to the left (Study 2). When we asked participants to identify the Chinese characters, they more quickly and accurately identified morally positive characters if they were oriented upright or turned to the right and more quickly and accurately identified immoral characters when the characters were distorted or rotated left. These results support the idea that physical cues are used in metaphorically encoding social abstractions and moral norms and provided cross-cultural validation for conceptual metaphor theory, which would predict our results.

Memorable, Meaningful, Pleasurable: An Exploratory Examination of Narrative Character Deaths.

The current manuscript presents a study that examines contextual factors that can explain two distinct types of viewer responses to death in narratives. Using procedures developed in past research, we explore why some narrative character deaths elicit poignant, eudaimonic responses while others elicit joyful, hedonic responses. We incorporate a control group to examine whether freely-recalled memorable deaths are more closely associated with feelings of meaning or pleasure. Results suggest that meaningful deaths lead to appreciation; befall liked, moral characters; and elicit mixed/negative affect, whereas pleasurable deaths lead to enjoyment; befall disliked, immoral characters, and elicit positive affect. In addition, freely-recalled character death is more closely aligned with meaningful death and its correlates than pleasurable death and its correlates. We conclude with a discussion of how the current findings can improve the use of mediated death in clinical settings, particularly as a strategy for approaching instances of disenfranchised grief.

THE LEADERSHIP OF TWO CHARACTERS IN TRANSFORMERS MOVIE

This research studied the character of two leaders in Transformers movie. There are six movies of Transformers , but the writer only took four movies squeal as the object research is because the changed story and character in the fifth and the sixth movies. The subject of this research is Optimus and Megatron character. There are two objectives in this research, the first is the leadership of two leaders and the second is the character of two leaders. The writer used the leadership theory into three categories the first category is Dilts’ model of leadership, the second category is Davis’ form of leadership theory and the third category is Stogdill’s characteristic of leadership. Meanwhile to find the character of two leaders, the writer used Johnson’s indirect characterization theory that consists of five methods namely is speech, thoughts, effect to other characters, action and looks. This research is categorized as descriptive qualitative that consists to data in the form of words and sentences. The data are dialog of script in movie. The results of this study, the writer found the different leadership and character two leaders. The writer found their characters and leaderships by seeing the interaction between leader and follower in movies. Optimus Prime’s leadership categorizes in macro leadership, leadership positive form and all of leadership characteristic. Optimus characters defined as moral character. Meanwhile Megatron’s leadership categorizes in meta leadership, leadership negative form and all of leadership characteristic. Megatron characters defined as immoral character.

Who Deserves Faulty Products? How Blaming the Victim Prevents Consumer Punitive Action

A core requirement of a functioning free‐market system is that consumers hold companies accountable for selling faulty products. Following a harmful product failure, any blame that is incorrectly directed toward the victim may threaten consumer well‐being. Four experiments—in contexts of both fictitious and actual high‐profile product failures—show that this may in fact occur. The findings show that for a victim possessing immoral character: (a) consumers exaggerate blame because, (b) the victim is seen as deserving of suffering in general and, as a result, (c) consumers are less likely to take punitive action against the company (e.g., petition signing, negative word of mouth, and supporting financial justice). One field experiment and three online experiments converge to show that morality's effects are unique from other traits (e.g., sociability), but may be attenuated based on severity of harm to the victim and consumers’ own beliefs about justice. In sum, the current research furthers understanding of how and why victims are blamed, how doing so may threaten consumer and societal well‐being, and how it might be prevented.

The virtues and vices of social comparisons: examining assimilative and contrastive emotional reactions to characters in a narrative

Based on social comparison theory, this study investigates how awareness of one’s morality and exposure to a character in a narrative affect emotions associated with four types of social comparisons—upward assimilative, downward contrastive, upward contrastive, and downward assimilative. A 2 (Morality Salience: virtue, vice) X 2 (Character: moral, immoral) experiment (N = 106) revealed that those whose vices were made salient elicited stronger: (1) contempt (a downward contrastive emotion) toward an immoral character than a moral character, and (2) envy (an upward contrastive emotion) toward a moral character than an immoral character. Whereas envy decreased positive affect, contempt increased it. Implications for assimilative and contrastive social comparisons with media characters that lead to distinct affective outcomes are discussed.

Are writers still “righting?”: a moral perspective to Adichie’s Americanah

While some scholars in the past believed that art should be a vehicle for moral control, some writers and critics in recent times appear to be saying that literary works should only entertain. This shift is reflected in the publication of literary works with controversial moral contents and a seeming lack of moral critique of them. This study, therefore, makes a case for a moral criticism in African fictional studies through an insightful moral critique of Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah. The critical offerings of scholars such as T.S Eliot and especially Plato were referred to and the tenets of the moral concept namely: restraint, discipline and order were extracted from them, with emphasis placed on restraint. Through a moral critique of the selected text, it is established that the novelist does not apply restraint in describing sex scenes and seems not to have adequately punished sexually immoral characters in the novel. While this could be a trend in the post-modern period, this study holds the opinion that the novel Americanah could be a negative influence on some readers.

I am ugly, but I am tender: the dominance of moral character and warmth

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the dominance of athlete endorser characteristics (i.e. moral character vs warmth) on athlete endorser perception and the influence of tarnished athlete endorsers (i.e. immoral character vs coldness) on brand evaluations from the perspectives of perceiver characteristics, including dispositional tendency, innate moral intuitions, and self-location (SL). Design/methodology/approach This research consists of three experimental studies with 135, 72, and 91 participants, respectively. Study 1 compared the dominance of moral character and warmth on athlete endorser perception. Study 2 examined the impact of perceiver characteristics on the cause-and-effect relationship between tarnished athlete endorsers (i.e. immoral character vs coldness) and brand evaluations. Study 3 investigated the cross-cultural generalizability of the US-based research findings in Study 2 for Indians. Findings Moral character is more influential than warmth on athlete endorser evaluations. Tarnished athlete endorsers with immoral character exert more negative influence than tarnished athlete endorsers with coldness characteristic on brand evaluations. Except for dispositional tendency, innate moral intuitions and SL moderate brand evaluations. Endorser and perceiver characteristics yield asymmetric patterns of influence on Americans’ and Indians’ brand evaluations. Research limitations/implications Future research is needed to verify the causal effects of thinking styles on the relationship between tarnished athlete endorsers and brand evaluations. Practical implications The determination of endorsement continuity has to jointly consider the characteristics of endorsers, perceivers, and cultures. Originality/value This research contributes to the endorsement research by advancing the research scopes of athlete endorser, perceiver, and culture characteristics.

Volition's Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature by Andrew Escobedo

Reviewed by: Volition's Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature by Andrew Escobedo Frank Swannack Escobedo, Andrew, Volition's Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature ( ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern), Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017; paperback; pp. 340; R.R.P. US $40.00; ISBN 9780268101664. In Volition's Face, Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern personifications channel energy 'as an expression of will' (p. 3). They create acts of volition as a discharge of what Escobedo terms 'prosopopoetic energy' (p. 6). Escobedo investigates why the medieval notion of the will and prosopopoeia continue to influence early modern literature. To address the complexities of his study, Escobedo reconsiders the much-studied link between personification and daemons. Through classical and Renaissance critical texts, he establishes that daemonism creates an energizing transaction between subject and external landscape. The similarities between allegory and personification are then analysed. In a fascinating argument, Escobedo states that personifications partially function [End Page 166] as character and allegorical signs. Through energizing personified traits, personifications spur literary subjects into action. Escobedo then tackles the widely explored history of the will. In an interesting twist, he discovers that ancient writers made no distinction between the will and self. Furthermore, medieval and Renaissance writers not only conceived of the will as independent, but it was also free from the cognitive processes of reason. Personifications became a part of the self over which the literary subject has no control. Little critical attention has been given to the Renaissance notion of the daemonic conscience. In the moral interludes of the Tudor period, Escobedo finds a difference between the Catholic and Protestant iterations. Catholic interludes often personify Conscience as activating the remorseful will to oppose despair through the anticipated joy of repentance. In Protestant texts, however, Conscience is separated from the will to become associated with despair. These differences in Reformed theology are further examined through the repentant will and the changing role of the conscience. Escobedo covers familiar theological ground to state that repentant Protestants have an insight into their own immoral character. His argument becomes satisfyingly more complex, when he examines a second-order act of volition countering the primary sin-driven daemonic conscience. It enables Escobedo to make a crucial distinction in Renaissance theological thought on the will. Following Conscience, the personification of Despair is examined in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. In order to understand the original usage of Despair by these Renaissance writers, Escobedo first summarizes his previous findings on personification. He usefully recapitulates that personifications flow between 'enactment and transmission' (p. 137). Personifications can represent daemonic energy and, also, be the daemons that possess the literary character. With Spenser's personification of Despair, Escobedo notes that although Despair commits suicide, he does not die. Spenser distinguishes between suicide as an act of will, and despair as an unavoidable religious malady with its own volition. In Doctor Faustus, Escobedo discovers a different type of prosopopoeia. He argues that the play's angels and daemons do not represent a part of or influence Faustus. Instead, he consumes them. Through an exciting analysis, Escobedo states that Faustus becomes his own autonomous will. The implication is that Faustus has no insight into his own despair. His sense of self has become part of an inescapable personification. Without a mediating act of volition to counter the daemonic conscience, he has become Despair. With the history of Love overrun with personifications, Escobedo analyses Spenser's Cupid in The Faerie Queene through Platonism. He challenges the critical consensus that there are two different Cupids in Spenser's epic poem. [End Page 167] Using Plato's notion of erotic rapture, Escobedo convincingly argues for a cruel daemonic Cupid necessary to inspire a desire for spiritual beauty. In John Milton's Paradise Lost, the personification of Sin is examined. Escobedo first investigates the connection between sin and serpents in premodern literature, which surprisingly eschews the beguiling biblical Genesis serpent in favour of Herodotus's Histories. Following a fascinating chicken and egg argument over whether pride or sin came first, Escobedo notes how, in Paradise Lost, the birth of Sin from Satan's head...

Gary Victor: Profile of a Writer for the People

Gary VictorProfile of a Writer for the People Françoise Cévaër (bio) Born in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince in 1958, Gary Victor is undoubtedly one of the most widely read writers in his country today. Outside of Haiti, his notoriety is slowly but surely growing, although he remains relatively unknown to an international audience, with the exception of Germany where his detective novels have been very successful. In this interview with the author, we are primarily concerned with the central character of his detective novel series, Inspector Dieuswalwe Azémar—a local police officer conducting an investigation in the very heart of Haitian Society—and with the author’s personal journey. The notes that accompany this interview are an attempt to contextualize Victor’s works within Haitian literature and to better understand the writer’s position in the literary landscape. “Gary Victor, King Créole”: It is in this manner that in 2006 journalist Thierry Leclère hailed the relatively unknown Haitian writer and introduced him to French readers in Télérama.1 By then, Gary Victor had already published five novels with Vents d’Ailleurs Publishers, although only two of them were entirely original editions, as the other texts had previously been published in Haiti.2 In fact, Gary Victor was already an inescapable figure of the Haitian literary landscape. He was a prolific established writer by the late 1980s, producing narratives in various genres. His works trace the contours of a world in which unbridled imagination becomes one with reality and where foundation myths, collective illusions, and vodou traditions combine and are recounted like so many other possible mysteries that [End Page 55] serve the power of the most vile and reinforce social violence. These all-powerful myths, which maintain social order, deeply penetrate Haitian mentalities and control individual as well as collective ideologies. The power of myths, which governs Haitians’ identity and their historical destiny—both individual and interlocking, is undeniably one of the most striking features of Victor’s fictional universe. Moreover, the author’s overflowing imagination and his often-biting humor, combined with his tendency to thumb his nose at conventions of all kinds, classify him as an iconoclast. His tales are populated with shattered idealists and immoral characters driven by their compulsions, their thirst for power and money. Directly inspired by current social and political events in his country, Victor’s characters reflect a devastating level of social and moral degradation. Victor’s rejection of static representations also provides us with a promising basis for exploring his position in the literary world. Presenting himself at the very beginning of Symphonie pour demain, his first self-published book, as one “who is self-taught by choice, educated far from the ideas which typify Haitian literature,”3 Victor has shown himself from the start to be a recalcitrant author who continuously pro-claims himself to be outside established intellectual circles and distant from literary convention. He openly declares his noncompliance in an often-provocative tone.4 Even as he writes from his island, and his fiction is permeated by Haitian myth and reality, the literary universe reflected in his works is vast. To begin with, his connection with the la Ronde group through common themes and literary genres is undeniable.5 Moreover, his fertile imagination; his taste for social commentary, allegories, and marvelous realism;6 as well as his disillusioned but affectionate portrayal of his own society place him firmly within the context of Latin American and Caribbean literature. Finally, his affinity for certain genres, such as science fiction or fantasy, align some of his works more with Anglo Saxon literature. Living and publishing in Haiti, Victor works within a literary setting that is more than 200 years old, but still under the influence of the French literary establishment—whose canons and hierarchies he mutilates even as he subtly manipulates certain accepted traditions. Thus, though he [End Page 56] seeks to reject any attempt at restrictive writing through stories that defy classification; celebrate a plurality of genres, tones, and forms; and decompartmentalize cultures,7 he also revisits abandoned esthetic traditions and makes them palatable to modern readers.8 His...

“A maelstrom of lying”: Bret Easton Ellis and himself

Bret Easton Ellis is one of the best known American writers of the XXI century. He published seven novels until now, and critics have been trying to solve his mysterious and bizarre work according to numerous approaches such as postmodernism, cultural studies, woman studies, among many others. Whereas these methods may have enlightened certain aspects of Ellis’ work, other elements, which are essential have remained unnoticed. The purpose of this essay is to call attention to the individual point of view of Ellis’ protagonists. I will, thus, challenge the frontier between reality and fiction, and prove that, by bringing the emotional experience of Ellis’ deranged and immoral characters to light, readers may undergo a much more intimate and intense experience.

Social perception of others shapes one's own multisensory peripersonal space

The perception of our self is not restricted to our physical boundaries, but it extends beyond the body to incorporate the space where individual–environment interactions occur, i.e., the peripersonal space (PPS). PPS is generally conceived as a low-level multisensory-motor interface mediating hand–object interactions. Recent studies, however, showed that PPS representation is affected by higher-level cognitive factors. Here we asked whether the multisensory representation of PPS is influenced by high-level mechanisms implied in social interactions, such as the social perception of others. To this aim, in Experiment 1, we developed and validated a new multisensory interaction task in mixed reality (i.e., the Social PPS task). This task allows measuring the boundaries of PPS between one self and another person in a fully controlled, yet highly ecological, set-up. In the Experiment 2, we used this task to measure how participants' PPS varied when facing another person. The social perception of this person was manipulated via a classic social psychology procedure, so that, in two conditions, she was perceived either as a moral or an immoral character. We found that PPS representation is sensitive to the social perception of the other, being more extended when participants were facing a moral than when facing an immoral person. This effect was specific for social context, as no change in PPS was found if participants were facing an object, instead of the person. Interestingly, the social manipulation affected also attitude, identification, willingness to interact with the other, so as interpersonal distance. Together these findings show that social perception of others affects both the psychological representation of the others in relation to oneself and the multisensory representations of the space between oneself and the other, offering new insights about the role of social cognition in body representation.

Moral character effects in endorser perception

Abstract This research consists of two experimental studies investigating the influence of moral character on endorser perception, and the influence of perceiver characteristics on tarnished endorser perception and brand evaluations. Perceiver characteristics are discussed from the perspectives of dispositional tendency, innate moral intuitions and self-location. The first study compared the influences of moral character and warmth on endorser perception. The second study examined the impact of perceiver characteristics on tarnished endorsers and brand evaluations. The findings reveal that moral character is more influential than warmth on endorser evaluations. Tarnished endorsers with immoral character exert more negative influence than tarnished endorsers with coldness character on brand evaluations. Innate moral intuitions and self-location moderate brand evaluations. High-morality consumers and heart-locators are more vulnerable than low-morality and brain-locators to the brands endorsed by tarnished endorsers, respectively.

L\u2019intrigue du gouverneur, le gouvernement d\u2019une intrigante? Mme de Genlis et Mme de Merteuil dans les Liaisons Dangereuses de Laclos

The two eighteenth-century novelists Choderlos de Laclos and Mme de Genlis were rivals in different fields. They were both employed by the duke of Orléans and thus occupied a public function. They both wrote an epistolary novel in 1782 and they both had very outspoken opinions about the widely debated subject of female education. The main hypothesis ventured in this article is that Laclos has used Mme de Genlis as a model for the immoral character of Mme de Mertueil in his famous novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Mme de Genlis’ contemporaries have mentioned a possible link between her and the character of Mme de Merteuil, but they did not mention which character traits the countess of Genlis could possibly have in common with this character. The above-mentioned, three-folded rivalry between Laclos and Mme de Genlis will serve as a starting point in order to understand why Mme de Genlis’ contemporaries could have made a link between her and Laclos’ character.