JCP Park Best Paper Award 2020 to Associate Professor Gülen Sarial Abi

“Stitching time: Vintage consumption connects the past, present, and future” is the recipient of the JCP Park Best Paper Award 2020. The award is for the best article published in Journal of Consumer Psychology three years prior to date. The award has been presented at the 2020 Society for Consumer Psychology Annual Conference in Huntington Beach, CA.

In their article, Sarial Abi and her co-authors investigated a novel avenue for buffering against threats to meaning frameworks: vintage consumption. Although the appeal of vintage goods, defined as previously owned items from an earlier era, is strong and growing, the article is among the first to examine the possible psychological ramifications of vintage consumption. Six studies found that vintage items mitigated the typical reactions to meaning threats. Four of these studies also showed that vintage consumption facilitates mental connections among the past, present, and future. As a result, people whose meaning structures had been threatened, for example, by being reminded of their own eventual death, preferred vintage products more than others who had not experienced a meaning threat, and more than similar non‐vintage products. These findings suggest that meaning disruptions stimulate a desire for intertemporal connections, a desire that vintage products—as existing and continuing symbols of bygone eras—seem to satisfy.

The Department extends its congratulations to Gülen!