The Impact Of Specific Emotions On The Information Processing Of The Consumer's Decisions Making

Emotion affect decision-making are the important areas of the decision-making psychology, and specifically the impact of specific-emotion on decision-making is a hot topic in this field. The current studies mostly take a valence-based approach to explore the impact of positive or negative emotions on the decision-making. With the application of specific-emotional paradigm, the studies on the specific emotions affect consumer's decision-making have made a lot of achievements, but a little on information processing. This study is based on the specific-emotional paradigm and the ATF theory to explorer the impact of specific emotions on the information processing of consumer decision-making. Three studies are employed.Study 1 was used to test whether emotions associated with certainty will lead the decision-makers make consistent certainty judgments by the subsequent information. The result demonstrate that participants who are induced to feel emotions characterized by certainty (anger) are more certain about their judgments when making a set of unrelated predictions than participants who are induced to feel emotions associated with uncertainty (sadness); but there is no difference between pride and anger conditions.Study 2 used the traditional persuasion paradigm to explore whether the emotions associated with certainty will have different affect on consumer information processing methods under different persuasion conditions. The results show that emotions associated with certainty (anger) resulted in greater reliance on heuristic cues than emotions associated with uncertainty (sadness), but there is no difference between pride and anger conditions.Study 3 employs the classic stereotypes paradigm to examine the impact of the negative emotions associated with opposite certainty on information processing of consumers. The results show that stereotype use increased that induced anger (a certainty associated emotion) than one that induced sadness (an uncertainty associated emotion).In summary, the results of this study further confirmed that in contrast to previous theories linking valence and processing, these findings suggest that the certainty appraisal content of emotions is an important characteristic in determining whether people engage in heuristic or systematic processing, and provides empirical evidence to the research of the ATF theory.