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Cognitive impairment is a consequence of the normal aging process that effects many species, including humans and rodent models. Decline in hippocampal memory function is especially prominent with age and often reduces quality of life. As the aging population expands, the need for interventional strategies to prevent cognitive decline has become more pressing. Fortunately, several major lifestyle factors have proven effective at combating hippocampal aging, the most well-known of which are environmental enrichment and exercise. While the evidence supporting the beneficial nature of these factors is substantial, a less well-understood factor may also contribute to healthy cognitive aging: social engagement. We review the evidence supporting the role of social engagement in preserving hippocampal function in old age. In elderly humans, high levels of social engagement correlate with better hippocampal function, yet there is a dearth of work to indicate a causative role. Existing rodent literature is also limited but has begun to provide causative evidence and establish candidate mechanisms. Summed together, while many unanswered questions remain, it is clear that social engagement is a viable lifestyle factor for preserving cognitive function in old age. Social integration across the lifespan warrants more investigation and more appreciation when designing living circumstances for the elderly.

Purpose This paper aims to advance the current understanding of social media (SM) brand engagement. Specifically, it validates the dimensionality of SM brand engagement, examines its drivers and explores the impact of SM brand engagement on brand equity. Design/methodology/approach A survey was conducted with 433 Generation Y (Gen Y) SM users. Findings The study results validate SM brand engagement as a multidimensional construct comprising utilitarian, hedonic and social dimensions. Three categories of SM engagement antecedents were identified: social factors (social identity and tie-strength), user-based factors (service, product and price information, hedonic motives and prior experience with SM) and firm-generated information (personalized advertising, mass advertising, promotional offers and price information). Finally, SM brand engagement was positively related to brand equity. Research limitations/implications This study focused on Gen Y SM users in India. This study should be replicated in other contexts to establish the generalizability of the findings. Practical implications A better understanding of the dimensionality and drivers of SM brand engagement can help managers to enhance their SM strategies to build brand equity. Originality/value This is the first study to provide a comprehensive examination of the dimensions, drivers and consequences of SM brand engagement.

Sustainable consumption, provision of a clean and healthy environment, as well as improvements to the quality of life of current and future generations, are all integral parts of the sustainable development strategy, which is understood as a compromise between the environmental, economic and social objectives of society. The pro-environmental and pro-social consumer engagement in sustainable consumption may lead to behavioral change, thus contributing to the resolution of current global challenges. Although recently the pro-environmental and pro-social engagement concept has received considerable attention, there is still no consensus on what determines it. Moreover, the recent research is limited to identifying individual factors of this phenomenon. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the factors that determine pro-environmental and pro-social consumer engagement in sustainable consumption. The authors employed a qualitative method approach, conducting semi-structured interviews with consumers engaged in sustainable consumption in Lithuania. The research results reveal that these consumers were affected by cognitive, attitudinal and psychosocial factors. In terms of external factors, consumers named contextual factors for sustainable consumption, social norms and the promotion of sustainable consumption. Research results also show an additional internal factor of perceived responsibility, which means perceived duty as an individual to do good for society and the environment.

Online knowledge exchange platforms have become an important information technology (IT) artifact that empowers online learning for the Internet users. A key challenge for knowledge exchange platforms is how to motivate the desirable user engagement behaviors. Based on the motivation theory and the equity theory, we propose a set of hypotheses regarding the spillover effects of financial incentives on three types of desirable yet non-incentivized user engagement, namely, voluntary knowledge sharing, knowledge seeking, and social engagement. We obtain an archival data set from a major online knowledge exchange platform (Zhihu.com) to evaluate our hypotheses. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment wherein the platform implemented a paid knowledge sharing feature, we employ difference-in-differences models in tandem with propensity score matching to evaluate the spillover effects of financial incentives on the abovementioned types of engagements. Our results show that the initial financial incentives on the paid knowledge sharing activities further motivate users to voluntarily share more knowledge and increase their social engagement in the platform. However, the financial incentives have no significant impact on users' knowledge seeking behavior. Our study suggests that the financial incentives not just have an effect on incentivized engagement, but they spillover to users' desirable non-incentivized online engagement behaviors. Therefore, the overall positive effect of financial incentives to a platform is likely under-estimated in prior research. Our research offers implications to practice that financial incentives can be an effective strategy to nurture users, to seed content, and to enhance sociality of a platform.

While gamification is gaining ground in business, marketing, corporate management, and wellness initiatives, its application in education is still an emerging trend. This article presents a study of the published empirical research on the application of gamification to education. The study is limited to papers that discuss explicitly the effects of using game elements in specific educational contexts. It employs a systematic mapping design. Accordingly, a categorical structure for classifying the research results is proposed based on the extracted topics discussed in the reviewed papers. The categories include gamification design principles, game mechanics, context of applying gamification (type of application, educational level, and academic subject), implementation, and evaluation. By mapping the published works to the classification criteria and analyzing them, the study highlights the directions of the currently conducted empirical research on applying gamification to education. It also indicates some major obstacles and needs, such as the need for proper technological support, for controlled studies demonstrating reliable positive or negative results of using specific game elements in particular educational contexts, etc. Although most of the reviewed papers report promising results, more substantial empirical research is needed to determine whether both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation of the learners can be influenced by gamification.

Making sustainable profits from a baseline zero price and motivating free consumers to convert to premium subscribers is a continuing challenge for all freemium communities. Prior research has causally established that social engagement (Oestreicher-Singer and Zalmanson 2013) and peer influence (Bapna and Umyarov 2015) are two important drivers of users converting to premium subscribers in such communities. In this paper, we flip the perspective of prior research and ask whether the decision to pay for a premium subscription causes users to become more socially engaged. In the context of the Last.fm music listening freemium social community, we establish, using a novel 41-month-long panel dataset, a look-ahead propensity score matching (LA-PSM) procedure coupled with a difference-in-difference estimator of the treatment effect, that payment for premium leads to more social engagement. Specifically, we find that paying for premium leads to an increase in both content-related and community-related social engagement. Free users who convert to premium listen to 287.2% more songs, create 1.92% more playlists, exhibit a 2.01% increase in the number of forum posts made, and gain 15.77% more friends. Thus, premium subscribers create value not only for themselves by consuming more content, but also for the community and site by organizing more content and adding more friends, who are subsequently engaged by the social diffusion emerging from the focal user’s activities.

The proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices has led to numerous companies investing significant resources in developing mobile applications, in every imaginable domain. As apps proliferate, understanding the impact of app adoption on key outcomes of interest and linking this understanding to the underlying mechanisms that drive these results is imperative. In this paper, we explore the changes in user behavior induced by adoption of a mobile application, in terms of engagement and matching outcomes in the online dating context. We also identify three mechanisms that are somewhat unique to the mobile environment, but are hitherto unestablished in the literature, that drive this shift in behavior: ubiquity, impulsivity, and disinhibition. Our main identification strategy uses propensity score matching combined with difference-indifferences, coupled with a rigorous falsification test to confirm the validity of our identification strategy. Our results demonstrate that mobile app adoption induces users to become more socially engaged as measured by key engagement metrics such as visiting significantly more profiles, sending significantly more messages, and importantly, achieving more matches. We also discover various mechanisms facilitating this increased engagement: ubiquity of mobile use—users log in more, and login across a wider range of hours in the day. We find that men act more impulsively, in that they are less likely to check the profile of a user who messaged them before replying to them. This effect is not visible for women who continue to be deliberate in their checking before replying even after adoption of the mobile app. Finally, we find that both men and women exhibit disinhibition, in that users initiate actions to a more diverse set of potential partners than they did before on dimensions of race, education, and height.

Theories of cognitive reserve, disuse syndrome and stress have suggested that activities that are mentally engaging, enjoyable and socially interactive could be protective against the development of dementia. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, this study shows that for adults aged 50 and older visiting museums every few months or more was associated with a lower incidence rate of dementia over a 10-year follow-up period compared with less-frequent visiting. This association was independent of demographics, socioeconomic status, health-related variables including sensory impairment, depression, vascular conditions and other forms of community engagement. Visiting museums may be a promising psychosocial activity to support the prevention of dementia.

Infant-directed singing is a culturally universal musical phenomenon known to promote the bonding of infants and caregivers. Entrainment is a widely observed physical phenomenon by which diverse physical systems adjust rhythmic activity through interaction. Here we show that the simple act of infant-directed singing entrains infant social visual behavior on subsecond timescales, increasing infants’ looking to the eyes of a singing caregiver: as early as 2 months of age, and doubling in strength by 6 months, infants synchronize their eye-looking to the rhythm of infant-directed singing. Rhythmic entrainment also structures caregivers’ own cueing, enhancing their visual display of socialcommunicative content: caregivers increase wide-eyed positive affect, reduce neutral facial affect, reduce eye motion, and reduce blinking, all in time with the rhythm of their singing and aligned in time with moments when infants increase their eye-looking. In addition, if the rhythm of infant-directed singing is experimentally disrupted—reducing its predictability—then infants’ time-locked eye-looking is also disrupted. These results reveal generic processes of entrainment as a fundamental coupling mechanism by which the rhythm of infant-directed singing attunes infants to precisely timed socialcommunicative content and supports social learning and development.

The aim of this research was to segment older people in subgroups with similar social engagement activity patterns in order to better target public health interventions. Cross-sectional data, collected in 2005 by Dutch community health services (response 79%), from 22026 independently living elderly aged 65 or older were used. Cluster analysis was performed to derive subgroups with common social engagement activity patterns, which were compared for their self-perceived health, mental health, physical health, and loneliness. Among the independently living older people, five subgroups were identified with different patterns of social engagement activities: less social engaged elderly, less social engaged caregivers, social engaged caregivers, leisure engaged elderly, and productive engaged elderly. The subgroups differed significantly in social engagement activities, socio-demographics, and health (p<0.001). The groups with the highest relative numbers of older people who were frequently engaged in leisure and productive-related activities, also included relatively more elderly with a good self-perceived health (85.8% versus 58.8%), mental health (91.3% versus 74.6%), physical health (97.7% versus 73.0%), and elderly who were not lonely (70.0% versus 52.0%) when compared to the least healthy subgroup. Older people could be segmented in subgroups based on similar social engagement patterns. Groups with elderly who were less socially engaged demonstrate to be possible target groups for public health interventions, given the relatively high shares of unhealthy older people among them.