Emotion and consumer choice: An analysis of the causes and consequences of negative, task-induced emotion in consumer decision domains

This research considers the causes and effects of negative, task-induced emotion in consumer decision domains. Three manipulations of emotion are developed for experiments assessing decision behavior. The tradeoff difficulty manipulation alters the degree to which the experimental decision task involves attributes associated with high degrees of loss aversion, which are proposed to be more distressing to give up. The conflict manipulation alters whether subjects must accept losses on the relevant attributes. The avoidant option manipulation involves whether or not alternatives likely to be perceived as emotion-minimizing, such as prolonging search or choosing the status quo, are available. Negative emotion is expected when tradeoff difficulty is high, conflict is high, and no avoidant choice is available.; In order to make predictions regarding decision behavior under negative emotion, I consider consumers' motivations to avoid negative emotion and their motivations to achieve decision accuracy in high-stakes situations. In Experiment One, subjects are expected to be more likely to avail themselves of avoidant choices when tradeoff difficulty is increased, as these choices may satisfy goals regarding avoiding negative emotion. In Experiment Two, the motivation to avoid negative emotion is expected to encourage more attribute-based (e.g., tending to consider one attribute at a time) decision processing at the same time that the motivation to accurately resolve the decision problem is expected to cause more extensive decision processing.; The dissertation's empirical work achieves mixed results. Experiment One demonstrates both that decision makers feel more negative emotion under high tradeoff difficulty and the absence of an avoidant choice and that avoidant options are chosen more under higher tradeoff difficulty, as expected. Experiment Two demonstrates that decision makers feel more negative emotion under high tradeoff difficulty and high conflict, as expected. However, my hypotheses regarding decision processing are not supported by Experiment Two, although these hypotheses are supported by a preliminary experiment using a more direct manipulation of task-related emotion. A final, exploratory study indicates that the level of emotion induced during Experiment Two was likely lower than that induced during this preliminary experiment, perhaps accounting for these conflicting findings.