random psychology

We spend more when we're sad

2008-02-10T16:25:00.000-08:00

ABC News - Down in the mouth? Why not pick up something nice for yourself?

It's a practice so common it has come to be called retail therapy. And in a recent study, researchers uncovered evidence of what shopaholics have known for years -- that people may be willing to spend more on themselves when they're feeling sad.

The study of 33 volunteers, to be published in the June 2008 edition of Psychological Science, found that feeling sad leads to self-centered thinking -- and this, in turn, can lead to a greater likelihood of dropping extra cash on something to make you feel better.

To reach their conclusions, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pittsburgh showed volunteers either a video clip that showed grief following a tragic death or a neutral clip from a nature show. Afterward, participants had the chance to purchase an ordinary item -- a sporty water bottle. They found that people who'd watched the sad video clip offered an average of 300 percent more money for the item than those who had viewed the neutral clip.

"The key contribution our paper adds to the literature is that a high degree of self-focus can carry over to spending," says lead study author Cynthia Cryder, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Other psychological experts not directly involved with the research agree that the findings are interesting.

"Many people go shopping when they feel a little down or badly about themselves," says Nadine Kaslow, professor and chief psychologist at the Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta. "Shopping can temporarily take people's minds off their troubles. Also, shopping for things we like can help us feel better about ourselves -- for example, clothes make us feel we look better."

This is not the first study to show a sadness-spending link.

"The two are related because they both deal with a way of filling up the emptiness inside that focuses on making their outside more attractive," says Beverly Hills-based psychiatrist Dr. Carole Lieberman, whose research on compulsive shopping goes back to the mid-1980s. She has since appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to discuss the phenomenon and penned the entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica explaining the behavior.

"The way I discovered it was because I was treating a lot of eating disordered patients at the time, and found that after I cured their eating disorder, they developed a compulsive shopping disorder," she said.

But it may well be the first time that this connection has been studied in such a highly controlled experiment, notes study co-author Jennifer Lerner, a professor at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Still, psychological experts not affiliated with the study say more research may be needed to draw solid conclusions.

"Tightly controlled experimental studies like this one offer unimpeachable evidence for the idea that emotions or thoughts influence spending behavior," says Paul Duberstein, director of the Laboratory of Personality and Development at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. "Having said that, I am concerned that the authors' interpretation of the data is not spot-on."

Specifically, Duberstein says, showing a video clip about death may have led to thoughts and emotions about death -- feelings that are already known to increase the urge to spend.

Cryder responds by noting that the controlled nature of the study ensures that sadness was the main emotion at play. "What we have measured is certainly sadness," she says.

From Crying to Buying

Lieberman says there's a strong rationale for the connection between sadness and spending.

"People who are sad, miserable or depressed usually feel an emptiness inside," Lieberman says. "So they engage in behaviors that fill up this emptiness, such as eating too much, drinking too much or spending too much."

The increased buying only occurs for sad people who are self-focused, Kaslow said. "In addition, it is the first project to that actually looks at what sad people might do financially to secure a commodity -- that is, what buying decisions would they make. This is very relevant to the real world, where people have a bad day or time in their life, feel sad, and shop to feel better."

But Kaslow is also quick to point out that the findings most likely only apply to those people who are a bit down -- not those who are clinically depressed.

"When people are really depressed, they typically don't have the energy or inclination to shop," she says.

Those who subscribe to the healing powers of retail therapy may do well to remember that overindulgence can cause a sad situation of a different sort -- the kind that hits you right in the wallet.

"Sometimes people shop beyond their means when they are stressed out and the bills then just add to further stress," Kaslow says.

Lerner says that she hopes the research will help people make better decisions when it comes to emotions and spending.

"Consumers should make a habit of reevaluating the major purchases they've made to lower the probability that an emotional state caused their spending," she says.

"We would like to determine whether this purchasing actually makes them feel better. We suspect that even if it does make them feel better, it's only in the short term."

Subliminal smells bias perception about one's likeability

2008-01-05T03:26:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily - Anyone who has bonded with a puppy madly sniffing with affection gets an idea of how scents, most not apparent to humans, are critical to a dog's appreciation of her two-legged friends. Now new research from Northwestern University suggests that humans also pick up infinitesimal scents that affect whether or not we like somebody.

"We evaluate people every day and make judgments about who we like or don't like," said Wen Li, a post-doctoral fellow in the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "We may think our judgments are based only on various conscious bits of information, but our senses also may provide subliminal perceptual information that affects our behavior."

Minute amounts of odors elicited salient psychological and physiological changes that suggest that humans get much more information from barely perceptible scents than previously realized.

To test whether subliminal odors alter social preferences, participants were asked to sniff bottles with three different scents: lemon (good), sweat (bad) and ethereal (neutral). The scents ranged from levels that could be consciously smelled to those that were barely perceptible. Study participants were informed that an odor would be present in 75 percent of the trials.

Most participants were not aware of the barely perceptible odors. After sniffing from each of the bottles, they were shown a face with a neutral expression and asked to evaluate it using one of six different rankings, ranging from extremely likeable to extremely unlikeable.

People who were slightly better than average at figuring out whether the minimal smell was present didn't seem to be biased by the subliminal scents.

"The study suggests that people conscious of the barely noticeable scents were able to discount that sensory information and just evaluate the faces," Li said. "It only was when smell sneaked in without being noticed that judgments about likeability were biased."

The conclusions fit with recent studies using visual stimuli that suggest that top-down control mechanisms in the brain can be exerted on unconscious processing even though individuals have no awareness of what is being controlled.

Besides Li, the study's co-investigators include Isabel Moallem, Loyola University; Ken Paller, professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern; and Jay Gottfried, assistant professor of neurology at Feinberg and senior author of the paper.*

"When sensory input is insufficient to provoke a conscious olfactory experience, subliminal processing prevails and biases perception," Paller said. "But as the awareness of a scent increases, greater executive control in the brain is engaged to counteract unconscious olfaction."

The acute sensitivity of human olfaction tends to be underappreciated. "In general, people tend to be dismissive of human olfaction and discount the role that smell plays in our everyday life," said Gottfried. "Our study offers direct evidence that human social behavior is under the influence of miniscule amounts of odor, at concentrations too low to be consciously perceived, indicating that the human sense of smell is much keener than commonly thought."

The study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that subliminal sensory information -- whether from scents, vision or hearing -- affects perception. "We are beginning to understand more about how perception and memory function," Paller said, "by taking into account various types of influences that operate without our explicit knowledge."

*The paper "Subliminal Smells Can Guide Social Preferences" was published in the December issue of Psychological Science.

Subliminal message can influence political views

2008-01-05T03:05:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily - Flag waving is a metaphor for stirring up the public towards adopting a more nationalistic, generally hard-line stance. Indeed, "rally 'round the flag" is a venerable expression of this phenomenon.

It comes as some surprise, then, that studies conducted by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have shown that exposing people to a subliminal image of the national flag had just the opposite fact -- moderating their political attitudes.

Further, the researchers say that their studies indicate that, in general, subliminal messages -- that is, messages that are processed by our brains but never reach our consciousness -- do indeed influence explicit attitudes and real-life political behavior, a significant extension to what we know about the effects of non-conscious processes.

The studies, led by cognitive scientist Dr. Ran Hassin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Psychology Department, show that the subliminal presentation of a national symbol affects not only political attitudes, but also voting intentions and actual voting in general elections.

In an article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Hassin reported on a set of experiments that examined the effects of the subliminal presentation of the national flag. The experiments involved over 300 participants who were recruited on the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University.

In the first experiment, the Israeli participants, divided into two groups at random, were asked about their attitudes towards core issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Prior to answering these questions, half of them were exposed to subliminal images of the Israeli flag projected on a monitor and half of them were not. The results show that the former group tended to shift to the political center.

In other words, a brief presentation of the Israeli flag -- so brief, that people didn't even notice it -- was sufficient to make people adopt more moderate views. Another experiment, that was conducted in the weeks that preceded the Israeli pullout from Gaza, replicated these results and reflected centrist views in relation to the withdrawal and Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.

The third experiment was held just prior to Israel's last general elections. The results were identical. The subliminal presentation of Israel's flag drew right wing, as well as left wing, Israelis towards the political center. Crucially, participants who were subliminally exposed to the flag said they intended to vote for more central parties than those who had not been exposed to the subliminal message. The researchers then called the participants after the elections, and found out that people who were exposed to the flag indeed voted in a more moderate way.

Why this exposure to a national symbol should have what appears to be a surprising moderating effect remains yet to be studied and analyzed.

"I think these results are interesting for two reasons," says Hassin. "First, they provide sound empirical evidence for the non-conscious ways in which national ideologies subtly affect our thoughts and behaviors. We are now extending this research to examine what other ideologies can do so and in what ways this is expressed. "

"Secondly," he continued, "these results significantly extend the empirical knowledge regarding the nature and influences of unconscious processes. We are now investigating the mental mechanisms that underlie this phenomenon, and I am confident that this journey will yield new insights to our understanding of the cognitive unconscious -- and hence, of consciousness itself."