The Impact Of Wealth Sources And Emotional Labels On Consumption

Mental accounting theory suggests that people encode different money in accordance with where the money is lies. Source of money affects the way of money consuming, with the deepening of the research, scholars have found that affective tag is the ecological factors that affect money consuming. In order to highlight the role of affective tag, Levav and Mc Graw(2009) named it “emotional accounting” to explore how the affective tag impacts on consumer decision making. On the basis of previous researches, we embark from the emotional accounting, replacing Hedonic consumption for Aesthetic consumption to conduct 5 empirical studies. Study one: To identify Utilitarian consumption and Aesthetic consumption for the following studies; Study two: To research how the resource of money and the “affective tag” influence its consumption; Study three: To research how the different negative emotions influence the money’s consumption; Study four: To research how “negative affective tag” influence different windfalls’ consumption; Study five: To research whether reappraisal of the negative money change its consumption. Follows are the results:(1) The effects of the affective tags on the regular income are not significant, regular income spending is relatively stable. The effects of the affective tag on the windfall are significant. Aesthetic consumption significantly reduced and storage item significantly increased in negative situations comparing to positive situations.(2) The effects of the affective tag on the utilitarian consumption are not significant.(3) It is the negative mood related to the windfall namely negative affective tag that affects the consumption rather than the unrelated negative mood.(4) Negative affective tag only affects the consumption of the windfall for gift significantly comparing to the windfall not for gift.(5) Reappraising the negative money reduced the participants’ negative mood and increased the aesthetic consumption significantly.