Spent: New research explores why sadness makes us splurge

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One day last spring, Harvard University psychologist Jennifer Lerner found out that a student of hers had suffered a relapse of a severe form of cancer. As she was walking home at the end of the day, she felt overcome by a wave of sadness.

But just beneath that sadness was another feeling, an urge that crept up on her as she was thinking about her student.

“I wanted to stop off at stores and buy things for my house,” she says. “It was so bizarre, but it was very hard to overcome—the urge to go shopping right then and there.”

The urge may have seemed odd, but it’s not uncommon. In fact, recent research has uncovered a strong connection between feelings of sadness and willingness to spend money on stuff—more money, in fact, than people would pay for the same stuff if they weren’t sad.

In a study published in June 2008 in Psychological Science, Lerner and her colleagues gave participants $10 and showed some of them a sad movie clip—a scene from the 1979 Ricky Schroder–Jon Voight tearjerker The Champ. The researchers asked those participants to describe how they’d feel if they found themselves in a situation like the one depicted. The rest of the participants watched a video about the Great Barrier Reef and wrote about their daily activities. Then all the participants were given the chance to buy a “sporty” water bottle.

The group that watched The Champ was willing to spend roughly four times as much for the bottle, $2.11 as opposed to 56 cents.

The study, titled “Misery Is Not Miserly,” distinguishes itself from previous research into emotional spending by suggesting why sadness might induce splurging. The authors found that just feeling sad wasn’t enough to affect people’s spending habits. They also had to be experiencing what the authors call “self-focus,” a state that’s often triggered by sadness. In the study, people were deemed high in self-focus if they frequently used me, myself, and I in their writing assignments. The authors hypothesize that the combination of sadness and self-focus makes people dwell on their shortcomings—on an unconscious level, they feel “devalued,” says Cynthia Cryder, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon and the study’s lead author. In response, they have an unconscious desire to acquire things that they hope will increase their self-worth.

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