Banking Happiness

Nostalgia: Retreat or Support in Difficult Times?

Ali Faraji-Rad and Leonard Lee

Journal of Consumer Research, 2022, vol. 49, issue 2, 336-358

Abstract: Merely anticipating a future sad event motivates consumers to “accumulate happiness” in order to enhance their ability to cope with the anticipated sadness later—a phenomenon that we call banking happiness. To bank happiness, consumers not only choose positive stimuli over non-positive stimuli when given the choice, but even when such a choice does not exist, tend to recall more positive memories. Consumers bank happiness because of the lay theory that happiness is a resource that can be accumulated (i.e., banked) and consumed later. As a proactive mood-regulation strategy, banking happiness differs from reactive mood regulation: (a) the strength of consumers’ happiness-is-bankable lay belief predicts their tendency to bank happiness, but not their propensity to repair their negative moods after actually experiencing sadness; (b) consumers who are more future-oriented are more likely to bank happiness in the face of anticipated sadness, whereas those who are more present-oriented are more likely to regulate their negative mood when they actually experience sadness. Further, believing that happiness is bankable may increase consumers’ engagement with positive stimuli when anticipating sadness, possibly boosting the hedonic utility consumers obtain from the positive stimuli and helping them to build a stronger buffer against the negative stimuli.

Keywords: affect and moods; happiness; mood regulation; lay theories; future orientation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jcr/ucab066 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:jconrs:v:49:y:2022:i:2:p:336-358.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Consumer Research is currently edited by Bernd Schmitt, June Cotte, Markus Giesler, Andrew Stephen and Stacy Wood

More articles in Journal of Consumer Research from Journal of Consumer Research Inc.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().