Feeling glum and introspective, and think a little shopping might be the ideal
therapy? Don’t do it.
According to a study released on Friday at the annual meeting of the Society for
Social and Personality Psychology, inward-looking people who are down in the
dumps tend to spend more money on the same item than their neutral-emotion
counterparts.

Earlier studies
have drawn a link between mood and spending habits, but this one highlighted the
key role played by how self-focussed a person is.

"It is the combination of
sadness and self-focus that drives the effect, and it turns out that sadness
leads to an increase in self-focus," said Cynthia Cryder, a doctoral student at
Carnegie Mellon University and one of the co-authors of the study.

"What we think is going on is
that sad and self-focussed people are feeling pretty bad about themselves and
have a decreased valuation of themselves. They want to enhance this valuation,
and one way to do this is by acquiring material goods," she said.

Placing a higher value on
those goods could be an attempt by the sad, self-focussed person to boost their
self-esteem by transferring the value of the item to themselves.

The big problem is, the
purchase is often regretted later. "A huge key to avoiding decision-effects like
this is being aware that you’re sad in the first place. But that’s rather hard
to do," Cryder said.

"Participants in studies such
as ours usually have no idea that their feelings influence their decisions, so
it’s impossible to correct," she said.

"Secondly, always re-evaluate
major purchases one day or one week after you make them so that you can make
sure that whatever you bought is still attractive to you," Cryder said.

"That lowers the probability
that you’ll have an over-priced mistake due to some fleeting influence that you
didn’t know about and still don’t know about. You just know, ‘Wow… why did I
pay so much for that?’"

Via Times of India