Personal Advertisements Research Articles

Stigma Toward People with Mental Illness as Potential Sexual and Romantic Partners

The general desire for social distance from people with mental illness is one common expression of stigma. Evolutionary theory predicts that mental illness should reduce the desirability of potential mates, but social distancing in the context of sexual and romantic relationships remains to be systematically explored. In order to test this and other evolutionary predictions, two studies examined perceptions of people with mental illness as short-term sexual mates and long-term romantic mates. Study 1 examined perceptions of people with schizophrenia (N = 168), depression (N = 164), and mental illness in general (N = 134) in terms of the traits typically possessed by desirable mates. For the majority of traits, participants evaluated people with mental illness as having significantly lower potential as short-term and long-term mates than the average person. Study 2 asked participants (N = 363) to evaluate personal advertisements depicting someone with mental or physical illness who was either high or low in physical attractiveness. Participants evaluated the person with mental illness as having lower than average potential as a mate, especially in terms of a long-term relationship. The results of the two studies provide preliminary evidence that stigma extends to perceptions of people with mental illness in a manner consistent with evolutionary theory.

Behavioural impact on internet usage and internet advertisements preference on young individuals

Advertisements over internet can be seen as a boon or bane for the internet users especially to youth who are the major contributors to internet usage. Any advertisement, if noticed, can lead to a particular behaviour or action. And internet advertisements are no exceptions. Most reviews with respect to internet advertisements indicate that it is disturbing for the genuine users and distracting to the youth. The five types of advertisements considered in this study are: social advertisements, sexy advertisements, celebrity advertisements, personal advertisements and promotional advertisements. This paper thus focuses on the behaviour of the youth with respect to the viewing of advertisements. The sample size of the study was 700 with schools and universities in Pondicherry and Chennai. The instrument used for data collection was a questionnaire. A SEM model was developed based on the responses collected to study the influence of advertisements on the positive and negative behaviours. Findings and suggestions were made based on the results. This study stands unique in the fact that there are no direct empirical studies based on the influence of positive and negative behaviours of youth on internet advertisements especially in the regions (Pondicherry and Chennai) considered in the study.

Reporting pre-exposure prophylaxis use in Craigslist personal advertisements among men seeking sex with men in the United States.

This study describes the self-reported use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in the personal advertisements of men seeking sex with men in the United States on the online classified advertisement site, Craigslist. Overall self-reported PrEP use was low (0.20%; 95% confidence interval (CI)=0.18-0.22). However, PrEP use in personal ads was described in conjunction with seeking sexual risk behaviours including 'bareback' sex (22.7%; 95% CI=17.7-27.7%) and sex with substance use (26.8%; 95% CI=21.5-32.1%). Only 4.0% of personal ads sought safe sex (3.3%; 95% CI=1.2-5.4%) or required condoms (0.7%; 95% CI=-0.3-1.7%). Our findings underscore the need for increased public PrEP awareness, particularly among men seeking sex with men, as well as the importance of healthcare providers emphasising sexually transmissible infection prevention behaviours (i.e. condom use) used in conjunction with PrEP.

PERSONAL ADVERTISEMENTS AS TEXT COLONIES: FEATURES AND TYPES OF COLONIES

The genre of personal advertisements is relatively new; nevertheless, various branches of the social and linguistic sciences deal with this text type since personal advertisements refl ect social behaviour and attitudes and thus may provide information about language and society. The present paper studies personal advertisements from the perspective of text colonies and compares printed and online advertisements in order to explore the language manifestations of the communicative strategies employed by the two media. The study is carried out on advertisements published in The Times and placed on the dating website datingdirect.com.

Courtship Initiation Behaviour in Online Personals

A personal advertisement has two aims; to promote its author and to attract potential love interest. In addition to providing textual information about physical appearance, occupation and interests, accompanying images in personal ads create meanings that are instrumental in building imaginary relations between the advertiser and the readers. This paper explores the notions of body language and interpersonal attitude and courtship initiation behaviour in online personal ads. Using Kress & van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design (2006) and Mehrabian’s dominant and affiliative dimensions (1981) this study examines how interpersonal relations are represented through the embodiment of affiliative and non-affiliative attitudes in images. Analysis of 581 images reveals several common visual personas through specific clusters of bodily stance and facial articulation that are instrumental in creating and establishing represented affiliation between the participants in the images and the viewers. As such this study is a contribution to scholars working in the area of visual analysis, identity and social semiotics as it identifies non-verbal realizations of affiliative and non-affiliative attitudes and demonstrates their interaction through a corpus-based analysis of personal ad images.

The Effect of Personal Expenses and Advertisement Expense on the Growth and Profitability of the Savings Bank

The Effect of Personal Expenses and Advertisement Expense on the Growth and Profitability of the Savings Bank

MATERYALİZM, ÖZ-BENZEŞİM VE BİREYSELCİLİĞİN KİŞİSELLEŞTİRİLMİŞ REKLAM KAMPANYALARINA YÖNELİK TUTUMLAR VE BU KAMPANYALARI SOSYAL AĞLARDA PAYLAŞMA NİYETİ ÜZERİNDEKİ ETKİLERİ

Bu çalışmanın amacı tüketicilerin materyalizm, bireyselcilik ve öz-benzeşim düzeylerinin kişiselleştirilmiş reklam kampanyalarına yönelik tutumları ve bu tür kampanyaları sosyal ağlarda paylaşma niyetleri üzerindeki etkilerini incelemektir. Bu amaçla, verilerin toplanmasında kolayda örnekleme yöntemi benimsenmiş, sosyal medya üzerinden kullanıcılar çalışmaya davet edilmiş ve bu daveti ağlarındaki diğer kişilerle paylaşmaları istenmiştir. Çalışma kapsamında elde edilen 144 veri, Smart PLS paket programı aracılığıyla analiz edilmiştir. Araştırma sonuçları tüketicilerin markaya yönelik öz benzeşim düzeylerinin ilgili markanın kişiselleştirilmiş reklam kampanyalarına yönelik tutum ve ilgili reklam kampanyasını sosyal ağlarda paylaşma niyeti üzerinde olumlu yönde anlamlı etkileri olduğuna işaret etmektedir. Ayrıca elde edilen bulgular, tüketicilerin materyalizm düzeyleri ve kampanyaya yönelik tutumlarının ilgili kampanyayı sosyal ağlarda paylaşma niyeti üzerinde olumlu yönde anlamlı etkileri olduğunu göstermektedir.

MATERYALİZM, ÖZ-BENZEŞİM VE BİREYSELCİLİĞİN KİŞİSELLEŞTİRİLMİŞ REKLAM KAMPANYALARINA YÖNELİK TUTUMLAR VE BU KAMPANYALARI SOSYAL AĞLARDA PAYLAŞMA NİYETİ ÜZERİNDEKİ ETKİLERİ

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of materialism, individualism and self-congruity on the consumers’ intention to share personalized advertisements on social network sites (SNS) and attitude toward such advertisements. For this purpose, using a snowball sampling technique, social media users were invited to participate the study and encouraged to forward the invitation to others. The obtained data from 144 social media users were used to estimate the structural equation model, using partial least squares through SmartPLS 2.0. The results indicate that self-congruity significantly and positively affects attitude toward personalized advertisement and intention to sharethose advertisements on SNS. In addition, findings show that materialism and attitude toward such advertisements have a positive and significant effects on intention to share.

It Is All in the Name: A Study of Consumers' Responses to Personalized Communication

ABSTRACTPersonalized communication is believed to be an effective persuasion strategy. However, few studies have examined the underlying processes responsible for its effects. This study investigates the role of perceived personalization as a mediating process. Three personalization strategies are compared: raising expectation, identification, and contextualization. The results confirm that perceived personalization mediates the effects of personalized advertising on attention, cognitive responses, and attitude toward the message. The increased attention caused by perceived personalization stimulates both positive and negative thoughts about the message. The findings imply that personalized advertisements have stronger effects when receivers are aware of the personalization elements.

Designing Incentive Schemes for Privacy-Sensitive Users

Businesses (retailers) often wish to offer personalized advertisements (coupons) to individuals (consumers), but run the risk of strong reactions from consumers who want a customized shopping experience but feel their privacy has been violated. Existing models for privacy such as differential privacy or information theory try to quantify privacy risk but do not capture the subjective experience and heterogeneous expression of privacy-sensitivity. We propose a Markov decision process (MDP) model to capture (i) different consumer privacy sensitivities via a time-varying state; (ii) different coupon types (action set) for the retailer; and (iii) the action-and-state-dependent cost for perceived privacy violations. For the simple case with two states ("Normal" and "Alerted"), two coupons (targeted and untargeted) model, and consumer behavior statistics known to the retailer, we show that a stationary threshold-based policy is the optimal coupon-offering strategy for a retailer that wishes to minimize its expected discounted cost. The threshold is a function of all model parameters; the retailer offers a targeted coupon if its belief that the consumer is in the "Alerted" state is below the threshold. We extend this two-state model to consumers with multiple privacy-sensitivity states as well as coupon-dependent state transition probabilities. Furthermore, we study the case with imperfect (noisy) cost feedback from consumers and uncertain initial belief state.

Is she the one? Personality judgments from online personal advertisements

AbstractThe authors examined the linguistic cues that inform personality judgments from online personal advertisements, and whether these judgments are accurate. Advertisers reported their personality, and 2 sets of naïve judges—including one that was seeking a romantic partner—rated advertisers' personality after reading their ads. Judges' impressions of extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability—3 traits that are strongly desired in a romantic partner—were influenced by particular lexical cues, such as word count, emotionality, and profanity. Both sets of judges formed accurate impressions for extraversion, but not other traits. These findings suggest that online daters use linguistic cues to judge the desirability of a potential romantic partner's personality, but that the impressions driven by these cues are not always accurate.

Chinese undergraduates' preferences for altruistic traits in mate selection and personal advertisement: Evidence from Q-sort technique.

Human's preferences for altruistic mates have been confirmed by many researchers. Under the deep influence of Confucianism that authorised more parental control over offspring's mate selection, Chinese people's mating strategies and mate preferences may be different from what the evolutionary psychologists have suggested. This study used the Q-sort technique to assess the roles of altruistic traits in mate selection and personal advertisement. A total of 200 university students participated in the Q-sort procedures and were asked to sort 50 traits (among which altruistic traits were mixed) according to their importance when choosing (or advertising to) a long-term (LT) or a short-term (ST) mate. Our findings were quite different from prior studies. When Chinese participants chose a mate or advertised themselves to a potential mate, kin altruism was considered to be the most important trait; altruistic traits were more preferred by males than by females and females tended to advertise themselves as more altruistic; preferences for altruistic traits showed no difference between LT and ST mate selections (or between personal advertisement to a LT and a ST mate).

“You've been on my mind ever since”: A content analysis of expressions of interpersonal attraction in Craigslist.org's Missed Connections posts

This study examined how interpersonal attraction was described in Craigslist.org's Missed Connections postings via a quantitative content analysis of randomly selected posts in the United States. Results indicated that, as predicted, Missed Connections postings contained a combination of multiple verbal (e.g., spoken interactions that are not greetings or praise/compliments) and nonverbal (e.g., physical attractiveness, eye contact, nonverbal body movements) attraction expressions; these posts included an average of just over two attraction expressions. Physical attractiveness was the most frequently expressed form of interpersonal attraction. There were no biological sex or sexual orientation differences in relation to which and how many attraction expressions were included in Missed Connections posts. Implications for attraction and online personal advertisement research are described.

A Technique for Selecting Online Advertisements using Mailbox Calendar Invites

This work presents a technique that you can use to serve highly relevant and personalized advertisements to users. The technique performs ad selection based on multiple criteria obtained from the data in a user's electronic mailbox (for example, meeting invites) in real time. The mailbox data is analyzed to identify the goals of a meeting, participants, nature of meetings, contents, and timings of meetings, etc. The derived data is then used to select the advertisement content most appropriate to the meeting originator, meeting participants, meeting schedules, etc. Identified advertisements are then delivered to target users on all available channels, such as web browsers, mailboxes, online games, and media players.

Identity in Online Personal Ads: A Multimodal Investigation

A personal advertisement constitutes a distinct form related to the small ad family of genres. While small adstraditionally offer an object or a service, the personal ad offers but, most essentially, seeks a romantic partner. Todate, studies of personal ads have mainly focused on patterns of represented traits in relation to identity, gender,age and sexuality in the verbal text. Given the self-promotional nature of the genre, image is also a powerful toolused as one of the resources for representing identity and engaging with others. Using social semiotic perspectiveand the framework of systemic functional linguistics, this study focuses on how identity is verbally and visuallyrealised in online personal ads. This paper has two aims: the first is to show how resources from verbal andvisual systems combine and complement one another to construe a variety of personal and social traits,clustering into different identity types. The second is to indicate the usefulness of these descriptions infacilitating a multimodal approach to the analysis of identity. The results revealed a convergence of verbal andvisual resources in identity performances, construing the slim and attractive woman and the funny but sensitiveguy, both aimed at invoking interest from potential partners. Identities emerged through the use of nominalgroups and processes and the categorizations associated with these resources. Images that are displayed on theprofile pages contain features that correspond to the tendered traits in the verbal description creating a holisticperformance of online identities.

Methods to Obtain Training Videos for Fully Automated Application-Specific Classification

Personalization approaches seek to estimate user preferences in order to recommend content or social network connections, or to serve personalized advertisements to users. Such approaches are being increasingly adopted by organizations to build customized personalization applications. Leveraging the growing popularity of Web videos for such approaches necessitates the ability to classify Web videos into application-specific categories, since different applications are interested in different aspects of the user preferences. A key requirement of supervised classification models to address this is the availability of training videos labeled to the arbitrary application-specific categories. In order to address this requirement, we propose a completely automated framework to obtain training Web videos for arbitrary categories, which does not rely on any manual labeling of videos. This is achieved utilizing keywords to retrieve training videos, thereby simplifying the problem of obtaining training videos to the problem of selecting keywords to retrieve them. We show that there are two opposing objectives (proximity and diversity) that need to be considered while developing such keyword selection techniques. We propose two efficient approaches (linear combination of proximity and diversity and annealing-based alternating optimization) and study the tradeoffs between them, with respect to performance and the human input required to tune parameters of the approach. Through experiments over several sets of categories, we demonstrate the feasibility of the automated framework to select training videos for application-specific categorization. We also show that the proposed approaches lead to a substantial improvement in the performance of classification models, as compared with other automated methods.

A comparison of heterosexual and homosexual mating preferences in personal advertisements

Human heterosexual mating preferences have been shown to conform to predictions drawn from evolutionary theory, with men and women adopting broadly distinct strategies. Attempts to reconcile sexual selection theory with homosexual behavior have been less consistent, however, and have largely focussed on addressing two alternative perspectives: (i) that gay men and lesbians display phenotypic traits in common with opposite sex heterosexual individuals or (ii) that homosexual individuals display sex-typical, or exaggerated sex-typical phenotypes. Testing these hypotheses is complicated by sampling issues involved in the study of human sexual orientation, since obtaining standardized and comparable samples of heterosexual and non-heterosexual mating preferences is a prerequisite to analysis. Here we present a comparison of homosexual and heterosexual mating strategies in men and women using a sample of 1733 personal (‘lonely hearts’) adverts gathered from a single source. We used principal components analysis in order to expose underlying structure of the advertisements, and identify three components involving relative emphasis placed on resources, physical attractiveness and personality when offering or seeking mate characteristics. While homosexual individuals are shown to resemble their own-sex heterosexual counterparts in terms of emphasis placed on partner physical attractiveness relative to partner personality, no clear pattern emerges in other aspects of advertisement strategy. Nevertheless, there we find no evidence in support of the hypothesis that homosexual men and women are intrinsically opposite-sex typical in terms of mate preferences.

‘A (Sensitive New Age Guy) with difference’

This paper explores the representations of gender identities in the discourse of 200 online personal advertisements by Malaysian men and women. Using a combination of discourse analytical tools and corpus linguistic techniques this study demonstrates the construal of identity as a complex interaction of identity categorization and attitudinal resources. I-statements and nominal groups (Halliday, 1994; Halliday and Mattheissen, 2004) form my points of entry and linguistic patterns are semantically classified according to attitude (Martin and White, 2005) and Social Actor categorization (Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2008). General patterns construing typical and atypical representations of gender identities were observed by comparing the types of structure, semantics and collocates the data revealed. Results showed that advertisers appear to orient to what is expected in the context of courtship initiation in this particular genre, and are found to produce socially specific verbal practices that correspond to what is sought by men and women in general – e.g. ‘the slim and attractive woman’ and ‘the successful man’. Additionally, findings are also found to challenge hegemonic gender practices, construing counter-stereotypes such as ‘the sensitive man’. More significant however, is the construal of a Malaysian identity type – i.e. ‘the simple person’ – that cuts across gender lines.

Self-Presentation, Desired Partner Characteristics, and Sexual Behavior Preferences in Online Personal Advertisements of Men Seeking Non-Gay-Identified Men.

Despite attention to the sexual behaviors of non-gay-identified (NGI) men who have same-sex encounters, virtually no research has focused on issues of partner desirability and selection. Limited evidence suggests that a subgroup of men who have sex with men (MSM) advertise online for sexual encounters with NGI men. Exchange theory provided a framework to investigate this seeking of NGI men, based on the content of Internet personal advertisements for same-sex encounters. Researchers analyzed 282 ads posted to an online bulletin board. Ads by men who explicitly desired encounters with NGI men were compared with those by men who did not indicate this preference in potential partners. Multivariate analyses revealed that NGI-seeking men had significantly increased odds of identifying as discreet (Adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 2.82), seeking a discreet encounter (AOR = 4.68), seeking a masculine partner (AOR = 2.18), being willing to host (AOR = 2.77), as well as seeking oral-receptive sex (AOR = 2.69), unprotected oral sex (AOR = 6.76), and anal-receptive sex (AOR = 2.18). Further, NGI-seeking ads were more likely to not mention condom use or safer sex practices (AOR = 4.13) and were less likely to indicate a desire for oral-insertive sex (AOR = 0.34) and rimming (AOR = 0.21). Findings suggest that some men may deliberately present themselves in ways that they perceive as being attractive to NGI men, and have research implications for NGI MSM, their partners, and the risk outcomes of these online ads.

Does Height Matter? An Examination of Height Preferences in Romantic Coupling

Amidst increasingly equality in belief and in practice between the sexes, we ask if height preferences still matter, and if so, why people say they matter. First, we collected data from Yahoo! dating personal advertisements. Second, we used answers to open-ended questions in an online survey. The Yahoo! data document that height is still important in decisions to date but that it is more important to females than to males. Results from the online survey indicate that women wanted tall men for a variety of reasons, but most of the explanations of our respondents were connected to societal expectations or gender stereotypes. Gender-based legitimation of height preferences seem to be more central than evolutionary-based legitimation, but future work may discover a more nuanced interpretation.