Shop when you are happier, for a study says that consumers in a positive mood can make quicker and more consistent judgements than unhappy people. “There has been considerable debate about how moods, emotions, feelings influence the quality of people’s decisions. We join this debate by looking at affect’s influence on a very basic element of decision-making: deciding if an object is liked or disliked,” lead researcher Bruce E. Pfeiffer of the University of New Hampshire said.
The researchers manipulated participants’ moods by showing them pictures of likeable objects (puppies) or unpleasant images (diseased feet) or asking them to recall pleasant or unpleasant events from the past.
After these “affect inductions” the subjects viewed pictures of common objects one at a time. They then chose from a list of evaluative adjectives, positive and negative, which were presented in a random order.
“Our prior research found that people respond faster to positive adjectives than negative adjectives. The present work finds that this difference disappeared for people in the positive affect conditions,” Pfeiffer said. Not only did people in the positive condition respond more quickly to adjectives, but they also responded more consistently. —PTI