Emotions and Consumer Behavior (Winter 2013)
Curator: Patti Williams
The impact of emotions on judgments, evaluations, and decisions has long been important to psychology and consumer behavior. The field’s focus has progressed from demonstrations that emotions, like cognitions, do have an impact on consumption, to more nuanced understandings of what drives the experience of discrete emotional states, how those discrete emotions uniquely affect decision making and the motivations that consumers might have to regulate their emotional states over time. The articles selected for this special collection offer further insight into these important topics. They examine how distinct perspectives shape the processes of appraisal that lead to emotional experience and how different consumers might define happiness distinctly. They examine emotions that vary by valence (positive, negative, and mixed) as well as emotions that are more hedonic versus those that rely on higher order self-conscious processes to arise. These studies also suggest new ways to distinguish among emotions and to assess their usefulness to consumers, by considering the emotion’s temporal frame. And they remind us that although arousal has received relatively little attention recently, compared to investigations focused on valence or appraisals, there are still many novel insights to be discovered by better understanding how consumers manage their experience of emotional arousal to achieve their own affective goals.
Lenses of the Heart: How Actors’ and Observers’ Perspectives Influence Emotional Experiences
Iris W. Hung
Anirban Mukhopadhyay
This research examines how the visual perspectives that people take to appraise an event, that is, whether they view themselves as actors in the situation or observers of it, influence the intensities of the emotions they experience. We predict that in a situation that elicits emotions, greater attention to the self (if using an observer’s perspective) leads to greater intensity of self-conscious emotions such as pride, guilt, and embarrassment, whereas greater attention to the situation (if using an actor’s perspective) leads to greater intensity of hedonic emotions such as joy, sorrow, and excitement. In this way, visual perspectives can act as situational antecedents that shape the use of emotion appraisals. Three experiments support these propositions and demonstrate the mediating role of appraisals, across a variety of emotion-eliciting contexts, that were visualized as well as recalled.
Bidirectional Dynamics of Materialism and Loneliness: Not Just a Vicious Cycle
Rik Pieters
This research is the first to test the hypothesis that consumers face a “material trap” in which materialism fosters social isolation which in turn reinforces materialism. It provides evidence that materialism and loneliness are engaged in bidirectional relationships over time. Importantly, it finds that loneliness contributes more to materialism than the other way around. Moreover, it finds that materialism’s contribution to loneliness is not uniformly vicious but critically differs between specific subtypes of materialism. That is, valuing possessions as a happiness medicine or as a success measure increased loneliness, and these subtypes also increased most due to loneliness. Yet seeking possessions for material mirth decreased loneliness and was unaffected by it. These findings are based on longitudinal data from over 2,500 consumers across 6 years and a new latent growth model. They reveal how materialism and loneliness form a self-perpetuating vicious and virtuous cycle depending on the materialism subtype.
Nostalgia: The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Xinyue Zhou
Tim Wildschut
Constantine Sedikides
Kan Shi
Cong Feng
Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for a personally experienced and valued past, is a social emotion. It refers to significant others in the context of momentous life events and fosters a sense of social connectedness. On this basis, the authors hypothesized that (1) nostalgia promotes charitable intentions and behavior, and (2) this effect is mediated by empathy with the charity’s beneficiaries. Five studies assessed the effect of nostalgia on empathy, intentions to volunteer and donate, as well as tangible charitable behavior. Results were consistent with the hypotheses. Study 1 found that nostalgia increases charitable intentions. Study 2 showed that this salutary effect of nostalgia on charitable intentions is mediated by empathy (but not by personal distress). Studies 3 and 4 corroborated these findings for different charities and in diverse samples. Finally, study 5 demonstrated that nostalgia increases tangible charitable behavior. By virtue of its capacity to increase empathy, nostalgia facilitates prosocial reactions.
How Happiness Affects Choice
Cassie Mogilner
Jennifer Aaker
Sepandar D. Kamvar
Consumers want to be happy, and marketers are increasingly trying to appeal to consumers’ pursuit of happiness. However, the results of six studies reveal that what happiness means varies, and consumers’ choices reflect those differences. In some cases, happiness is defined as feeling excited, and in other cases, happiness is defined as feeling calm. The type of happiness pursued is determined by one’s temporal focus, such that individuals tend to choose more exciting options when focused on the future, and more calming options when focused on the present moment. These results suggest that the definition of happiness, and consumers’ resulting choices, are dynamic and malleable.
An Arousal Regulation Explanation of Mood Effects on Consumer Choice
Fabrizio Di Muro
Kyle B. Murray
This article examines how consumers’ preferences are affected by the interplay between their level of arousal and the valence of their current affective state. Building on prior research examining the regulation of mood valence, the authors propose that consumers are also motivated to manage their level of arousal. It is predicted that this motivation systematically affects consumers’ product preferences such that consumers in a pleasant mood will tend to choose products that are congruent with their current level of arousal, while those in an unpleasant mood will tend to choose products that are incongruent with their current level of arousal. The results of three consequential choice studies—that use scent and music to vary consumers’ moods—provide strong support for the hypotheses. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the results.
