Retail Therapy: Does Sadness Mean Spending?

Feb. 8, 2008— -- 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.