Mood Management and Travel Preferences: The Impact of Guilt and Shame is an Active Feeling-Monitoring Process

Abstract

People usually engage in leisure or travel activities to adjust their moods. Thus, mood management may be a crucial mechanism for travel preferences and decision- making. Previous research has pointed out that different negative affects of the same valence may have distinct, yet predictable, influence on decision processes. Based upon the perspective of ”affect-as-information” and mood management, this research was aimed to examine if there were different impacts of guilt and shame on individuals' preferences for travel type when they wanted to adjust these negative affects by traveling. In terms of travel type, guilt may motivate people to generate a higher need for affiliation and inclinations of social sharing and interpersonal interaction; results of Experiment 1 found that participants with guilty affect were biased in favor of a group-package-tour because it may satisfy their mental inclinations. On the other hand, people with shamed affect tend to possess lower need for affiliation due to avoidance from others' evaluation as well as save self-esteem with self-enhancement. Therefore, they were biased in favor of individual travel which may provide opportunities of personal achievement and of being free from interference of group members. Experiment 2 was conducted to test whether the effect of mood management on the preference for travel type is an active process of feeling-monitoring or a passive and overlearned attentional shift. The results revealed that the contrasting effect of guilt and shame on the preference for travel type was only pronounced when travelers made decisions for themselves and expected they would be affected by the outcomes of the decisions. In contrast, this contrasting effect was not significant when they made decisions in the agent condition. This finding indicated that travelers' mood management is like a feeling-monitoring process which not only conveys distinct types of information to the decision-maker but elicits different implicit goals.