Premium
The pleasure of possessions: affective influences and personality in the evaluation of consumer items
Author(s) -
Ciarrochi Joseph,
Forgas Joseph P.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
european journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.609
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1099-0992
pISSN - 0046-2772
DOI - 10.1002/1099-0992(200009/10)30:5<631::aid-ejsp12>3.0.co;2-t
Subject(s) - psychology , mood , openness to experience , feeling , personality , pleasure , affect (linguistics) , need for cognition , social psychology , cognition , value (mathematics) , psychotherapist , communication , neuroscience , machine learning , computer science
What is the role of affect in the way people perceive and evaluate their material possessions? Participants induced to feel good or bad estimated the subjective and objective value of a number of consumer items they owned or wanted to own. Participants also completed the Openness to Feelings (OF) scale. As expected, mood had no effect on objective evaluations. However, we found a significant interaction between personality (OF) and mood on subjective evaluations. Individuals scoring high on OF showed a clear mood congruent pattern: They made more positive evaluations of consumer items when in a positive rather than negative mood. In contrast, people scoring low on OF showed an opposite, mood‐incongruent bias. Openness to Feelings moderated the mood effects regardless of whether the mood was induced using an autobiographical or a video mood induction procedure, and regardless of whether the items were owned or merely desired. The results are interpreted in terms of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for mood effects on consumer judgments, and the role of personality variables in moderating these effects is discussed. The implications of the findings for contemporary affect‐cognition theories, and for our understanding of the variables influencing consumer judgments are considered. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.