Using Single-Neuron Recording in Marketing: Opportunities, Challenges, and an Application to Fear Enhancement in Communications
作者向营销和消费者研究者介绍了人类单神经元记录方法。首先，他们概述了该方法、优缺点及前人研究结果。接着，讨论了该方法对营销和消费者行为的意义，特别是在分类、感官辨别、对新奇与熟悉刺激的反应以及经验回忆方面的应用。然后，作者展示了一项研究，说明如何开展单神经元研究及处理分析数据。该研究考察了人们上调（即增强）恐惧情绪的能力，这对设计有效的恐惧诉求有启示。结果显示，先前被证明对恐惧内容有选择性反应的神经元，其放电频率在情绪增强指令下增加，但仅针对不会自动引发强烈恐惧的视频。作者讨论了这些发现如何说明单神经元研究能得出和不能得出的结论。
This article introduces the method of single-neuron recording in humans to marketing and consumer researchers. First, the authors provide a general description of this methodology, discuss its advantages and disadvantages, and describe findings from previous single-neuron human research. Second, they discuss the relevance of this method for marketing and consumer behavior and, more specifically, how it can be used to gain insights into the areas of categorization, sensory discrimination, reactions to novel versus familiar stimuli, and recall of experiences. Third, they present a study designed to illustrate how single-neuron studies are conducted and how data from them are processed and analyzed. This study examines people's ability to up-regulate (i.e., enhance) the emotion of fear, which has implications for designing effective fear appeals. The study shows that the firing rates of neurons previously shown to respond selectively to fearful content increased with emotion enhancement instructions, but only for a video that did not automatically evoke substantial fear. The authors discuss how the findings help illustrate which conclusions can and cannot be drawn from single-neuron research.