Zhongqiang (Tak) Huang

The University of Hong Kong | HKU · Faculty of Business and Economics

Sleepiness, the subjective feeling of the propensity to fall asleep, is a common, everyday experience that can be induced by various factors, such as sleep quality, sleep deprivation, ingestion of certain substances, or belief about how much sleep a person needs. Despite its prevalence, sleepiness and its influence on consumption behavior are rarel...

This research examines how incidental exposure to death-related information in the media affects consumers' value orientation and scope sensitivity to marketing stimuli. Five studies demonstrate that, in contrast to thoughts about one's own mortality, exposure to death-related information in the media can shift consumers' focus from extrinsic to in...

Nostalgia, which is induced by reminiscing about a positive past experience, can counteract loneliness and promote prosocial behavior. However, the process of recalling and thinking about a nostalgic experience can have quite different effects. Because nostalgic experiences rarely reoccur, people are motivated to savor them by prolonging the time t...

Previous research has devoted much attention to the direct consequences of an assortment's content (e.g., actual number of different options) and structural features (e.g., organization of an assortment) on perceptions of variety. The present research, however, shows that a superficial feature, i.e., font readability of a menu or catalog, can influ...

Feeling crowded in a shopping environment can decrease consumers’ evaluations of a product or service and lower customer satisfaction. However, the present research suggests that a crowded environment can sometimes have a positive impact on consumer behavior. Although feeling crowded motivates consumers to avoid interacting with others, it leads th...

Consumers often need to schedule different activities. While consumers who adopt a clock‐time scheduling style decide when to transition from one activity to the next according to external temporal cues (e.g., clock), those who adopt an event‐time scheduling style tend to perform each activity until they feel internally that it is completed. This r...

People’s schedules are jointly determined by their biological clock and social clock. However, their social clock often deviates from the biological clock (e.g., having to get up earlier than one’s natural wake-up time for work or study, having to stay up to work night shifts or meet a project deadline)—a phenomenon known as “social jetlag.” How do...

Thoughts about one’s death can not only induce death anxiety but also activate death-related semantic concepts. These effects of mortality salience have different implications for judgments and behavior. We demonstrate these differences in an investigation of variety-seeking behavior. Four experiments showed that the anxiety elicited by thinking ab...