Sadness and Consumption

Jennifer S. Lerner and Nitika Garg

Scholarly Articles from Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Abstract: Sadness influences consumption, leading individuals to pay more to acquire new goods and to eat more unhealthy food than they would otherwise. These undesirable consumption effects of sadness can occur without awareness, thus representing more than just conscious attempts at “retail therapy.†In an experiment with real food consumption, the present paper examines the hypothesis that sadness’ impact on consumption could be attenuated if the choice context counteracted appraisals of helplessness and enhanced a sense of individual control. Results revealed that: (1) sadness elevates self†reports of helplessness in response to the emotion inducing situation, (2) helplessness mediates the sadness†consumption effect, and (3) inducing a sense of control (via choice) attenuates sadness’ effect.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Consumer Psychology

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9642635 ... nd%20Consumption.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not found (http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9642635/Sadness%20and%20Consumption.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9642635/Sadness%20and%20Consumption.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hrv:hksfac:9642635

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard Kennedy School of Government Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().