• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.553-564
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• 1998

Background: The immediate hoot response to LPS is the production of proinflammatory cytokines that act as intercellular mediators in inflammatory reactions, including acute lung injury. These "early response" cytokines transmit signals from recognition cells to target or effector cells. This host response is further amplified by the expression of leukocyte chemoattractants, growth factors, and adhesion molecules, resulting in an array of proinflammatory events. This experiment was performed to define the lung origin of proinflammatory cytokines, such as TNF-$\alpha$, IL 6 in early periods of endotoxin induced acute lung injury (ALI). Method: The healthy male Sprague-Dawley, weighted 150 - 250g, were divided into saline control (NC) and endotoxemia-induced ALI (ETX-), and leukopenic endotoxemia-induced ALI (CPA-ETX-Group) which was induced by cyclophosphamide, 70 mg/kg i.p. injection. Acute lung injury was evoked by LPS, 5 mg/kg, intravenously administered. Bronchoalveolar lavage was performed at 0, 3, 6 h after LPS-treated to estimate the influx of phagocytes and concentration of total protein, and cytokines as TNF-$\alpha$ and IL 6 by a bioassy using MIT method. We also examined the localization of TNF-$\alpha$ and IL 6 protein in endotoxemia-challenged lung tissue by immunohistochemical stain (IH). Results: The total cell, macrophage and PMN count in BALF were elavated in ETX group compared to NC(p<0.05). In CPA-ETX group, total cell and macrophage count in BALF were not changed compared to NC. but PMN count was markedly reduced and it took part in less than 0.1 % of total BAL cells (p<0.01). The protein concentration in BALF were significantly increased in ETX and CPA-ETX group Compared to NC (p<0.05), but there was significant difference between ETX- and CPA-ETX group only at 6 h (p<0.05). This observation suggested that even if PMNs are involved in the pathogenesis of acute lung injury, their role cannot be viewed as essential The concentration of TNF-$\alpha$ and IL 6 in BALF was significantly increased in the ETX- and CPA-ETX group compared to NC. There was no difference between ETX- and CPA-ETX group. In IH, anti-TNF-$\alpha$- and anti-IL 6 antibody was strongly localized at interstitial monocytes and alveolar macrophages in endotoxemia-challenged lung tissue. From above point of view, activated alveolar macrophage/monocyte considered as a prominent source of proinflammatory cytokines in endotoxemia-challenged lung injury. Conclusion: The prominent source of proinflammatory cytokines in early periods of endotoxemia-induced lung injury will be the activated resident macrophages like an alveolar macrophage and interstitial monocytes. The pulmonary macrophage/monocyte will impact the initiation and continuance of lung injury without PMNs's certain inflammatory role, particularly in endotoxemia-induced acute lung injury.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.1529-1537
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• 2009

To elucidate further the antitumor effects of a natural L-arginine analogue, L-canavanine, the mechanism underlying apoptogenic activity of L-canavanine and its modulation by protein tyrosine kinase $p56^{lck}$ was investigated in human Jurkat T cells. When the cells were treated with 1.25 to 2.5 mM L-canavanine for 36 h, several apoptotic events including mitochondrial membrane potential (${\Delta\Psi}m$) loss, activation of caspase-9, -3, -8, and -7, poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) degradation, and DNA fragmentation were induced without alteration in the levels of Fas or FasL. These apoptotic changes were more significant in $p56^{lck}$-deficient Jurkat clone JCaM1.6 than in $p56^{lck}$-positive Jurkat clone E6.1. The L-canavanine-induced apoptosis observed in $p56^{lck}$-deficient JCaM1.6 cells was significantly reduced by introducing $p56^{lck}$ gene into JCaM1.6 cells by stable transfection. Treatment of JCaM1.6/lck cells with L-canavanine caused a transient 1.6-fold increase in the kinase activity of $p56^{lck}$. Both FADD-positive wild-type Jurkat T cell clone A3 and FADD-deficient Jurkat T cell clone I2.1 exhibited a similar susceptibility to the cytotoxicity of L-canavanine, excluding involvement of Fas/FasL system in triggering L-canavanine-induced apoptosis. The L-canavanine-induced apoptotic sub-$G_1$ peak and activation of caspase-3, -8, and -7 were abrogated by pan-caspase inhibitor (z-VAD-fmk), whereas L-canavanine-induced activation of caspase-9 was not affected. These results demonstrated that L-canavanine caused apoptosis of Jurkat T cells via the loss of ${\Delta\Psi}m$, and the activation of caspase-9, -3, -8, and -7, leading to PARP degradation, and that the $p56^{lck}$ kinase attenuated the ${\Delta\Psi}m$ loss and activation of caspases, and thus contributed as a negative regulator to L-canavanine-induced apoptosis.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.185-202
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• 2012

.Since the value of information has been realized in the information society, the usage and collection of information has become important. A facial expression that contains thousands of information as an artistic painting can be described in thousands of words. Followed by the idea, there has recently been a number of attempts to provide customers and companies with an intelligent service, which enables the perception of human emotions through one's facial expressions. For example, MIT Media Lab, the leading organization in this research area, has developed the human emotion prediction model, and has applied their studies to the commercial business. In the academic area, a number of the conventional methods such as Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) or Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been applied to predict human emotion in prior studies. However, MRA is generally criticized because of its low prediction accuracy. This is inevitable since MRA can only explain the linear relationship between the dependent variables and the independent variable. To mitigate the limitations of MRA, some studies like Jung and Kim (2012) have used ANN as the alternative, and they reported that ANN generated more accurate prediction than the statistical methods like MRA. However, it has also been criticized due to over fitting and the difficulty of the network design (e.g. setting the number of the layers and the number of the nodes in the hidden layers). Under this background, we propose a novel model using Support Vector Regression (SVR) in order to increase the prediction accuracy. SVR is an extensive version of Support Vector Machine (SVM) designated to solve the regression problems. The model produced by SVR only depends on a subset of the training data, because the cost function for building the model ignores any training data that is close (within a threshold ${\varepsilon}$) to the model prediction. Using SVR, we tried to build a model that can measure the level of arousal and valence from the facial features. To validate the usefulness of the proposed model, we collected the data of facial reactions when providing appropriate visual stimulating contents, and extracted the features from the data. Next, the steps of the preprocessing were taken to choose statistically significant variables. In total, 297 cases were used for the experiment. As the comparative models, we also applied MRA and ANN to the same data set. For SVR, we adopted '${\varepsilon}$-insensitive loss function', and 'grid search' technique to find the optimal values of the parameters like C, d, ${\sigma}^2$, and ${\varepsilon}$. In the case of ANN, we adopted a standard three-layer backpropagation network, which has a single hidden layer. The learning rate and momentum rate of ANN were set to 10%, and we used sigmoid function as the transfer function of hidden and output nodes. We performed the experiments repeatedly by varying the number of nodes in the hidden layer to n/2, n, 3n/2, and 2n, where n is the number of the input variables. The stopping condition for ANN was set to 50,000 learning events. And, we used MAE (Mean Absolute Error) as the measure for performance comparison. From the experiment, we found that SVR achieved the highest prediction accuracy for the hold-out data set compared to MRA and ANN. Regardless of the target variables (the level of arousal, or the level of positive / negative valence), SVR showed the best performance for the hold-out data set. ANN also outperformed MRA, however, it showed the considerably lower prediction accuracy than SVR for both target variables. The findings of our research are expected to be useful to the researchers or practitioners who are willing to build the models for recognizing human emotions.

• (The)Study of the Eastern Classic
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• no.69
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• pp.349-371
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• 2017

"Hajaeilgi(荷齋日記)" was written by Ji Gyu-sik, a gongin of Saongwon(司饔院)'s branch, almost everyday for 20 years and 7 months from January 1st, 1891 until the leap month of June 29th, 1911. It deals with many different areas including domestic and foreign circumstances, custom, rituals, all the affairs related to the branch, and also everyday life events he did see or hear about. Particularly, Ji Gyu-sik did not belong to the yangban class, and we can hardly find diaries written by such class' people. Here, what this author pays attention to among the things written in "Hajaeilgi" is the contents about folklore. Ji Gyu-sik wrote in his "Hajaeilgi" about things related to folklore, for example, seasonal customs, folk plays, rituals, or folk beliefs that were actually practiced then as a person not belonging to the yangban class. Such diaries are rare, and its value is highly appreciated as a material, and it is meaningful in the aspects of folklore as well. Therefore, as part of the work to look into folklore found in "Hajaeilgi", this author focuses on national rituals and folk beliefs in it. The things that have been discussed earlier can be summed up as follows: About national rituals, it is sorry that it only deals with the emperor's enthronement and emperor and crown prince's birthday in garye(嘉禮); however, it is meaningful to know that the people faithfully carried out national ceremonies and celebrations then. Particularly, it is noteworthy that during the national ceremonies or celebrations, students were asked to sing the national anthem. About hyungrye(凶禮), only it deals with the court funeral rite. Aside from Minbi's funeral rite, the court funeral rite was performed properly at the right time according to the procedure like before, and also, it seems that the people fulfilled it faithfully by order of the government. Also, it can be learned from it that Japanese killed Minbi, burned the body with oil, and left the ashes behind. About folk beliefs, the branch held a memorial service at the shrine of the town regularly. The town, too, performed Gocheongsinsa each year. The money needed for the memorial service was collected from the town people differently according to their financial situations, and they prepared for jesu for the ancestral rite altogether. The memorial service was carried out in Sansindang or Bugeundang, too, and it was common that they summoned a shaman to perform a gut. The diary is valuable as material. After being a Christian, Ji Gyu-sik once tried to abolish sinsa jesa held in hoesa and get rid of saesin(賽神), that is, a gut or pudakgeori, but he had no choice but to follow the precedent. Meanwhile, it is also noteworthy that when the town suffered from floor and infectious disease, Ji Gyu-sik installed an altar in front of his house for the town's wellbeing and health, prepared for jesu including offerings and drinks, and held a memorial service to Hwangcheonhuto(皇天后土; the gods of heaven and earth) accompanied with the town people. Also, when he had any hardships in his family, Ji Gyu-sik summoned a shaman for a gut or offered a devout prayer to the mountainous god. Such shamanism or the things like worshiping Gwanseongjegun(關聖帝君) mostly in the beginning of January and telling fortunes about the year were all folk beliefs. This was very popular among the people, and it seems that it was deeply rooted in his life as well. Also, Ji Gyu-sik supported Fengshui beliefs, and it seems that it is not different from the people's general tendencies, either. As described above, "Hajaeilgi" dealing with national rituals and folk beliefs in it is valuable as material and is meaningful for research on forklore, and moreover, it is also significant in the aspects of forklore as well.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.1-23
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• 2013

To discover significant social issues such as unemployment, economy crisis, social welfare etc. that are urgent issues to be solved in a modern society, in the existing approach, researchers usually collect opinions from professional experts and scholars through either online or offline surveys. However, such a method does not seem to be effective from time to time. As usual, due to the problem of expense, a large number of survey replies are seldom gathered. In some cases, it is also hard to find out professional persons dealing with specific social issues. Thus, the sample set is often small and may have some bias. Furthermore, regarding a social issue, several experts may make totally different conclusions because each expert has his subjective point of view and different background. In this case, it is considerably hard to figure out what current social issues are and which social issues are really important. To surmount the shortcomings of the current approach, in this paper, we develop a prototype system that semi-automatically detects social issue keywords representing social issues and problems from about 1.3 million news articles issued by about 10 major domestic presses in Korea from June 2009 until July 2012. Our proposed system consists of (1) collecting and extracting texts from the collected news articles, (2) identifying only news articles related to social issues, (3) analyzing the lexical items of Korean sentences, (4) finding a set of topics regarding social keywords over time based on probabilistic topic modeling, (5) matching relevant paragraphs to a given topic, and (6) visualizing social keywords for easy understanding. In particular, we propose a novel matching algorithm relying on generative models. The goal of our proposed matching algorithm is to best match paragraphs to each topic. Technically, using a topic model such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we can obtain a set of topics, each of which has relevant terms and their probability values. In our problem, given a set of text documents (e.g., news articles), LDA shows a set of topic clusters, and then each topic cluster is labeled by human annotators, where each topic label stands for a social keyword. For example, suppose there is a topic (e.g., Topic1 = {(unemployment, 0.4), (layoff, 0.3), (business, 0.3)}) and then a human annotator labels "Unemployment Problem" on Topic1. In this example, it is non-trivial to understand what happened to the unemployment problem in our society. In other words, taking a look at only social keywords, we have no idea of the detailed events occurring in our society. To tackle this matter, we develop the matching algorithm that computes the probability value of a paragraph given a topic, relying on (i) topic terms and (ii) their probability values. For instance, given a set of text documents, we segment each text document to paragraphs. In the meantime, using LDA, we can extract a set of topics from the text documents. Based on our matching process, each paragraph is assigned to a topic, indicating that the paragraph best matches the topic. Finally, each topic has several best matched paragraphs. Furthermore, assuming there are a topic (e.g., Unemployment Problem) and the best matched paragraph (e.g., Up to 300 workers lost their jobs in XXX company at Seoul). In this case, we can grasp the detailed information of the social keyword such as "300 workers", "unemployment", "XXX company", and "Seoul". In addition, our system visualizes social keywords over time. Therefore, through our matching process and keyword visualization, most researchers will be able to detect social issues easily and quickly. Through this prototype system, we have detected various social issues appearing in our society and also showed effectiveness of our proposed methods according to our experimental results. Note that you can also use our proof-of-concept system in http://dslab.snu.ac.kr/demo.html.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.1-20
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• 2013

Nowadays, social network is a huge communication platform for providing people to connect with one another and to bring users together to share common interests, experiences, and their daily activities. Users spend hours per day in maintaining personal information and interacting with other people via posting, commenting, messaging, games, social events, and applications. Due to the growth of user's distributed information in social network, there is a great potential to utilize the social data to enhance the quality of recommender system. There are some researches focusing on social network analysis that investigate how social network can be used in recommendation domain. Among these researches, we are interested in taking advantages of the interaction between a user and others in social network that can be determined and known as social relationship. Furthermore, mostly user's decisions before purchasing some products depend on suggestion of people who have either the same preferences or closer relationship. For this reason, we believe that user's relationship in social network can provide an effective way to increase the quality in prediction user's interests of recommender system. Therefore, social relationship between users encountered from social network is a common factor to improve the way of predicting user's preferences in the conventional approach. Recommender system is dramatically increasing in popularity and currently being used by many e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, Last.fm, eBay.com, etc. Collaborative filtering (CF) method is one of the essential and powerful techniques in recommender system for suggesting the appropriate items to user by learning user's preferences. CF method focuses on user data and generates automatic prediction about user's interests by gathering information from users who share similar background and preferences. Specifically, the intension of CF method is to find users who have similar preferences and to suggest target user items that were mostly preferred by those nearest neighbor users. There are two basic units that need to be considered by CF method, the user and the item. Each user needs to provide his rating value on items i.e. movies, products, books, etc to indicate their interests on those items. In addition, CF uses the user-rating matrix to find a group of users who have similar rating with target user. Then, it predicts unknown rating value for items that target user has not rated. Currently, CF has been successfully implemented in both information filtering and e-commerce applications. However, it remains some important challenges such as cold start, data sparsity, and scalability reflected on quality and accuracy of prediction. In order to overcome these challenges, many researchers have proposed various kinds of CF method such as hybrid CF, trust-based CF, social network-based CF, etc. In the purpose of improving the recommendation performance and prediction accuracy of standard CF, in this paper we propose a method which integrates traditional CF technique with social relationship between users discovered from user's behavior in social network i.e. Facebook. We identify user's relationship from behavior of user such as posts and comments interacted with friends in Facebook. We believe that social relationship implicitly inferred from user's behavior can be likely applied to compensate the limitation of conventional approach. Therefore, we extract posts and comments of each user by using Facebook Graph API and calculate feature score among each term to obtain feature vector for computing similarity of user. Then, we combine the result with similarity value computed using traditional CF technique. Finally, our system provides a list of recommended items according to neighbor users who have the biggest total similarity value to the target user. In order to verify and evaluate our proposed method we have performed an experiment on data collected from our Movies Rating System. Prediction accuracy evaluation is conducted to demonstrate how much our algorithm gives the correctness of recommendation to user in terms of MAE. Then, the evaluation of performance is made to show the effectiveness of our method in terms of precision, recall, and F1-measure. Evaluation on coverage is also included in our experiment to see the ability of generating recommendation. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperform and more accurate in suggesting items to users with better performance. The effectiveness of user's behavior in social network particularly shows the significant improvement by up to 6% on recommendation accuracy. Moreover, experiment of recommendation performance shows that incorporating social relationship observed from user's behavior into CF is beneficial and useful to generate recommendation with 7% improvement of performance compared with benchmark methods. Finally, we confirm that interaction between users in social network is able to enhance the accuracy and give better recommendation in conventional approach.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.177-207
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• 2012

Today's consumers perceive consumption as a representation of themselves. It is not simply an act that fulfills a consumer's physical and practical needs. Even in terms of life quality, consumers increasingly want to achieve an emotional and sensible experience through consumption. Consumers now make decisions based on their need to express their position in relation to other people, pursue emotional satisfaction, and try to improve the quality of life. Culture-art products that meet such internal and external demands of consumers have made significant improvements in both quantity and quality, because of the social interest and policy support. The recognition of personal and social values of culture and arts has brought about interest in and need for culture-art products. Businesses have agilely embraced such change and actively implemented various marketing strategies utilizing culture and arts. For example, businesses began to sponsor artists who produce culture-art products while building facilities for cultural and art performances or exhibitions. Businesses have also provided performances and exhibitions free-of-charge or at affordable prices. As a result, the supply in the market has started to exceed its demand as is often the case in many of other markets. However, such imbalance has occurred not because of over-supply but because of a lack of demand. Given these circumstances, the government and culture and art related organizations, which had mainly concentrated on the supply side, started to recognize the importance of creating personal and social values in culture and arts. As a result, the government and various organizations are now creating various strategies that include policy measures to achieve their new found goal. Unfortunately however, such efforts are not meeting the expectations. Focusing on above-mentioned circumstances and problems, this study aims to find measures to create demand for culture-art products in the internal conditions of those who consume culture-art products. In other words, given that the demand for culture-art products has not increased despite all external conditions to encourage consumption, this study aims to find the reasons in consumers' value judgment on culture-art products. Though there were recent studies on culture-art products that applied consumer behavior on marketing theories, most of them focused on peripheral aspects such as people's motivation for or satisfaction from watching culture-art events. Hence, there is a need to understand what kind of value consumers perceive from culture-art products and how such value cognition leads to consumption in a comprehensive manner. This study acts as follow-up to a separate study entitled "Qualitative Study about Value Cognition and Benefits of Consumer on Culture-Art Products". The current study aims to extend practical implications that enhance the effectiveness of marketing strategies among the producing and policy agencies in the industry. The purpose of this study is to investigate dimensions of value cognition, benefits and attributes of culture-art products, and identify the effects of consumer value cognition on benefits and attributes. The questionnaire was developed based on the conceptual structure of qualitative research and previous researches. It was composed of value cognition, benefits, attributes of culture-art products and demographic variables. This survey was conducted on-line and off-line among a total of 662 persons ranging from their teens to their 50's who were living in Seoul, Gyeonggi-do, various metropolitan cities, and small and medium-sized cities. The data collected was analyzed by factor analysis and path analysis using SPSS WIN 18.0 and AMOS 16.0. This empirical study found that the dimensions of value cognition of culture-art products were categorized into personal goods, aesthetic goods and public property. This shows that the consumers perceive culture-art products as products that are worthy enough to pay the costs not just for personal benefits but also for their social values. Also the formation of value cognition for culture-art products requires special conditions unlike that for physical consumer goods and services, which simply require marketing stimuli. The dimensions of benefits pursued by consuming culture-art products were found to be composed of four types - pursuit of aesthetic benefits, pursuit of actual benefits, pursuit of emotional benefits, and pursuit of conspicuous character. This result implies that people consume culture-art products not just to pursue pleasure from emotional and intelligent satisfaction as well as social relations, but also to seek the needs and benefits embodied at a social level. The dimensions of attributes of culture-art products had seven different factors, - environmental, price, evaluation, people, artwork, composition, and personal relations - which is plentiful. This is because the attributes of culture-art products are very complicated compared to other consumer goods or services. Since culture-art products include not just cultural or artistic works but also all physical, human, environmental, and systemic elements of the products in a comprehensive manner, consumers perceive everything they experience in the process of consuming culture-art products as part of the products. The dimensions of value cognition was found to affect attributes of the products, mostly using pursued benefits as a mediating factors. This result is consistent with the result of qualitative research, and proves that applying the means-end chain theory in the reverse direction is reasonable. The result can be interpreted that consumers' value cognitions for culture-art products turns into actual benefits leading to consumers' decisions. Furthermore, this result reveals that when consumers choose culture-art products, they take into account the attributes of culture-art products depending on the benefits they pursue. These results confirm that despite their conceptual and abstract attributes, culture-art products have values that contribute to actual benefits for individual consumers and society. Hence, value cognition generates benefits to be pursued and this in turn affects the consumers' choices of attributes on products. Based on the conceptual structure of consumers' value cognitions on culture-art products and its dimensions, it is possible to find detailed methods to provide opportunities for education and training to form and reinforce positive value cognition on culture-art products. And through those methods, it will be possible to develop attributes of culture-art products according to the dimensions of pursued benefits, and allow conceptual products become the subject to valuable consumption in real life. These results provide theoretical understanding of consumer behavior in culture marketing and useful information to culture-art producers, companies that use culture and art, and government agencies that use culture-art as a mean to improve the public perception of quality of life. As a follow up on this study, there should be experimental studies that can develop criteria visualizing the demands of consumers who purchase culture-art products and identify their detailed attributes. Studies that compare characteristics of different areas within the culture-art product category and in-depth studies on a specific area or genre will also be needed. In order to develop marketing strategies for culture-art products, studies on the formation and reinforcement of positive value cognition on culture-art products and education for the development of consumer demand as well as on the development and differentiation of attributes of culture-art products depending on types of consumer groups should also follow.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.65-96
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• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.