A Study On The Implicit And Explicit Attitudes Of Elderly Consumers Towards Health Products

The market of health products,which principally targets at elderly people,has remained controversial.Through the latest research paradigm of the affect misattribution procedure(AMP),the research in this paper discusses whether context effects and attachment have a role to play in the attitudes of elderly consumers towards health products.In view of the research goals,three experiments have been designed to explore the attitudes of elderly consumers towards health products.The first one mainly deals with the establishment of a gallery-based system on the elderly people's evaluation of health products and common pills to ensure that the validity of the research is not affected by preferences such as the type and brand of health products.The second one tests whether elderly consumers are able to distinguish different types of products,the their attitudinal differences towards common pills and health products,and the relationship between the implicit and explicit attitudes of the subjects.The third employs mixed design to add emotional and contextual elements to the typical AMP,using attachment types as between-subject variables to look into the regulating effect of different types of attachment styles on fear of death.According to the results of the research:i)The elderly subjects hold different attitudes towards health products and common pills.The implicit attitude measurement shows that the preference for health products is significantly higher than that for common pills,while there is no significant difference shown in the explicit attitude measurement.ii)Implicit-explicit attitudinal discrepancy is not shown in elderly consumers' attitudes towards health products and common pills,which verifies the high correlation between implicit and explicit attitudes.iii)The subjects of different types of attachment styles have different implicit attitudes towards heath products depending on the emotional contexts.Subjects of the resistant attachment style show a significant variance in evaluating health products in different emotional states,while subjects of the secure attachment style show the least variance in evaluating health products in different emotional states,which verifies that attachment styles have a regulating effect on fear of death.