This article examines the retirement savings behaviour of twenty-five 30-40 years olds automatically enrolled into a workplace pension scheme. Using qualitative interviews, the paper explores the interaction between savings motivation and willingness to adhere to, or deviate from, the pension scheme defaults. Integrating insights from different savings paradigms, including sociological approaches and behavioural economics, the paper highlights how social motives drove willingness to accept enrolment defaults. Participants’ reactions to the contribution defaults were motivated by a complex combination of factors including anchoring effects, the salience of ageing, and emotional responses such as pride, uncertainty and loss aversion. The author’s main premise is that greater attention needs to be given to the interaction between subjective feelings about saving for retirement and pension scheme design.

Usually it is accepted that human manifestations such as music or painting share a common artistic trait. However, very little is known about the genetic, behavioral, developmental and neurobiological basis of such a musical-pictorial “universal”. In an attempt to approach commonalities and differences between the psychology of music and pictorial art in Experiment 1 we investigated the emotional dimensions valence and arousal in a large sample (N =156, Mage = 21,44 years, SD = 3,89 years, range = 16–35 years) using a representative selection of musical and pictorial artistic stimuli. We found a stronger variability of valence and arousal with paintings and stronger effects of music on valence. In Experiment 2 (N =202, Mage = 21,35 years, SD = 3,57 years, range = 16–35 years) we present first quantitative data on the interaction between the two artistic categories of stimuli on a behavioral level, again observing effects of pictorial art and music on valence and arousal. Furthermore in Experiment 2 we replicated a more pronounced effect of music on the valence of pictures, particularly on positive valence the results of the ANOVA showed an increase in group A2: F(1, 120) = 6.23, p < .05, in group C2: F(1, 120) = 89.03, p < .001, and a surprisingly emotionally negative influence of pleasant paintings on the positive valence of music, group A1: F(1, 127) = 19.69, p < .001. Despite the unresolved problem of non-representativeness of the stimuli and the sample selected these results may suggest superior emotional “power” of music over painting.