Emotions and Consumer Behavior

Abstract

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. Hung and Mukhopadhyay examine the influence of actor versus observer perspectives on the emotional experience. Building on the importance of cognitive appraisals in generating emotions, the authors take a step back and examine antecedent psychological processes that might differentially direct attention to certain types of situational information, influencing appraisals and the intensity with which certain emotions are felt. They find that actors tend to focus more on the situation at hand and experience more intense hedonic emotions, such as excitement or sadness when they recall or anticipate emotional experiences. On the other hand, because observer perspectives lead to greater attention to the self in the situation, observers experience more intense self-conscious emotions, such as pride, embarrassment, or guilt. While a significant amount of recent research has built understanding about how appraisals shape emotional experiences, this study opens up interesting questions about the processes that generate the appraisals that consumers might make. While Hung and Mukhopadhyay are focused on the broad distinctions between hedonic versus self-conscious emotions, the next three articles in the collection focus upon three discrete emotions that influence consumer behavior. Previous research has linked the experience of loneliness with materialism, suggesting that when consumers attach too great an importance to possessions, they may reduce the importance of their social relationships, leading to isolation and feelings of loneliness. This may, unfortunately, lead to a downward spiral of even more attachment to material objects and even more loneliness. With interesting longitudinal data, Pieters examines the interrelationships between loneliness and three subtypes of materialism: acquisition centrality (where possessions enable hedonic pleasure seeking), possession-defined success (where possessions are a status symbol), and acquisition as the pursuit of happiness (where possessions are a material means to improving happiness). This study finds a reciprocal relationship between the latter two subtypes of materialism and loneliness, but importantly, the effect of loneliness on these subtypes was greater over time than was the effect of these subtypes on loneliness. Thus, materialism may arise as a way to cope with loneliness, which suggests that to decrease materialism, one may want to first focus on building social relationships and reducing loneliness rather than focusing first upon reduced consumption. Or perhaps one might focus on using possessions as a source of fun rather than as a source