Wu_Eugenia_Dissertation_Abstract

							          Will I Always Choose Champagne?: How Emotion Norms Shape Consumption Choices
                                            Eugenia Wu
                                          Duke University

Emotion is a fundamental aspect of human life – very little, if any, of life occurs in a completely feeling-
less vacuum. Though many of the emotions we feel are visceral, gut-level responses to the events taking
place, our emotional experiences as a whole are governed by societally-held emotion norms regarding
when we should feel specific emotions and which emotions are appropriate to what situations. As an
example, we learn early on that we should feel sad at a funeral and happy at a party. A vast amount of
research suggests that we actively try to ensure that our emotional experiences are in line with what’s
expected – conformity to emotion norms has been linked to positive social and psychological benefits
and deviations from the norms are associated with psychological distress and negative social
consequences.

Though emotion norms are an ever-present factor that guide and shape our emotional experience, little
research has examined how these norms might influence consumption behavior. In this research, I begin
to bridge that gap by exploring how emotion norms might encourage individuals to make certain
consumption choices in an attempt to achieve or avoid specific emotional states. In particular, I focus
my work on how emotion norms might lead individuals to make some rather unexpected choices.

In my dissertation, I focus on how the emotion norm associated with the experience of feeling ashamed
can lead individuals to make choices that are inconsistent with mood regulation and the hedonic
principle. Specifically, I suggest that because shame is typically characterized by feelings of
worthlessness and undeservingness (Tangney and Dearing, 2002), shame comes with an emotion norm
that one does not deserve to feel positively. Furthermore, I suggest that this anti-positivity emotion
norm, in combination with our basic desire to make hedonic choices and alleviate negativity (Gilbert,
Wilson and Centerbar, 2003), leads individuals to prefer consumption products that elicit neither
positive nor negative emotion but psychologically uncomfortable and aversive mixed emotions instead.

Over a series of studies, I first confirm that consumers do believe that emotion norms underlie many
everyday life situations and that these norms do have an influence on their behavior. In particular, I
validate that the emotion norm in shame is an avoidance of positivity. I then find that the anti-positivity
emotion norm in shame leads individuals to prefer mixed emotion-eliciting products over purely positive
or negative emotion-eliciting products. This occurs despite the fact that mixed emotions are
psychologically uncomfortable and aversive. Finally, I explore both how making emotion-norm
consistent consumption choices affects individuals’ sense of connectedness to society and the product
evaluation implications of such choices.

Taken together, this work builds on and extends the existing research on motivated emotion, mixed
emotion and emotion norms in 1) suggesting a novel reason for why individuals might seek out one
emotional state or another 2) providing an explanation for why mixed emotion-eliciting products might
succeed in the marketplace and 3) examining how this fundamental social structure influences
consumption behavior.