No abstract

Student life causes many sources of stress due to the requirements of managing schoolwork, family, friends, health and wellbeing, and future career planning. Some students are overwhelmed and lack resilience to overcome stress, especially if they are inexperienced in managing setbacks, fail to achieve expectations, or lack skills to independently manage social skills, recreation, and study time. The long-term accumulation of stress has a negative impact on students’ physical and mental health, and may lead to a range of symptoms such as depression, anxiety, headache, insomnia, and eating disorders. Although most universities provide psychological counseling services, there is often a shortage of professional psychologists, which leads to students suffering from stress for longer than necessary without immediate assistance. The build-up of stress can lead to tragic consequences including abnormal reasoning, anti-social behavior, and suicide. There should never be a need for a student to wait more than a month to make an appointment for counseling services and every request for help should be immediately addressed and assessed. In this research, we designed a unique test platform for an immersive virtual reality group chatbot counseling system so students can receive psychological help and stress management counseling anytime and anywhere. First, the research used questionnaires to measure the stress levels and identifies how stress affects their lives. An immersive virtual reality chatbot was developed using professional psychological counseling knowledge that can provide answers during individual or group counseling sessions. Students can log in to the platform as avatars and ask the chatbot questions or interact with other students on the platform. This research provides college students with a new technology-based counseling environment designed to help relieve stress and learn new ways to improve student life quality from others. The platform provides a test base for future clinical trials to evaluate and improve the automated virtual reality chatbot counseling system.

The issue of socially responsible consumption (SRC) has been discussed from a perspective of behavioral change. Empathy is a moral emotion to motivate this behavioral change and includes cognitive and affective elements. Yet, the process of how an individual generates empathy cognitively and affectively is still unclear. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to discuss two types of self‐consciousness which result in empathic concern that changes consumers' behavior to be more socially responsible. This research conducted two studies via Amazon Mechanical Turk including the self‐evaluation surveys of 428 participants and surveys of 351 participants about a simulated shopping scenario. Structural equation modeling method was employed to examine the hypotheses. Two studies showed that private self‐consciousness significantly influences empathic concern about SRC. Moreover, age and income significantly moderated the relationship between private (vs. public) self‐consciousness and empathic concern. These findings suggest that experiential marketing strategies could be used particularly on younger or lower‐income consumers as they tend to feel empathy through private self‐consciousness of moral values on helping others. This research also suggests that nonprofit organizations should collaborate with for‐profit sectors by triggering consumers' empathic feelings in terms of private and public self‐consciousness and demographic factors.

Ad messages in cause-related marketing (CRM) motivate consumers' anticipatory guilt if they do not do good things (i.e., do not purchase cause-related products). According to cognitive dissonance theory, consumers tend to purchase cause-related products in order to reduce anticipatory guilt for maintaining cognitive consistency. We further hypothesize that in CRM ads, the positive effect of product hedonism on anticipatory guilt is moderated by country-of-origin (COO) image. When consumers perceive greater hedonic COO image from the ad, they are more likely to purchase cause-related products through anticipatory guilt due to product hedonism. 182 subjects were randomly assigned to 2 (product hedonism: low vs. high) × 2 (COO image: low hedonic vs. high hedonic) between-subjects design. The results confirm our moderated mediation model. In addition, we find that the moderating effect of COO image does not lead to consumers' negative responses toward CRM because of too strong anticipatory guilt. Thus, this research can suggest effective CRM strategies for firms.