Emotional spending
Buying to change how one feels, most often to lift sadness, stress or boredom, sometimes to celebrate. Sadness tends to raise what people will pay, and they often deny that mood played any part.
What drives it
A purchase brings anticipation, a sense of control and a small reward, all of which shift mood quickly. For identification the link between the feeling and the basket is the point, since the same purchase can be ordinary or emotional depending on what came before it.
How it shows
Work
Online orders placed after a bad meeting, lunch-break shopping on deadline days, parcels arriving at the office after a hard week, a big purchase the day a promotion falls through.
Relationships
Shopping after an argument, hiding bags or deleting order emails, ‘it was on sale’ as the explanation, gifts bought for a partner as an apology.
Self
Notice what you were feeling in the hour before your last unplanned purchase, how long the lift lasted, and whether parcels sit unopened in the hall.
What tells it apart
Compulsive buying: Compulsive buying is a recognised, treatable pattern of loss of control, preoccupation and harm. Emotional spending is common and usually limited, and becomes a concern when it escalates, is hidden or builds debt.
Mental accounting: Mental accounting is about labels on money. Emotional spending is about mood, and is more likely when the spending follows a feeling rather than a windfall.
Financial infidelity: Financial infidelity is hiding money matters from a partner. Emotional spending may lead to it when purchases are concealed, but the starting point is the feeling, not the secret.
A test
Ask the person to recall their last three unplanned purchases and what happened in the hour before each. The same feeling before buying, such as sadness after a call or stress after work, makes emotional spending more likely.
Questions to carry
- In the hour before the last unplanned purchase, what had happened?
- What was I hoping to feel when I pressed buy, and how long did it last?
How strong the research is
moderate. Cryder, Lerner, Gross and Dahl (2008) found that people shown a sad film offered more for an ordinary item while denying the film had any effect, and a later replication found a pooled effect that was small to medium (Garg, Williams and Lerner, 2018). Atalay and Meloy (2011) found retail therapy was more strategic than impulsive, modest in cost and free of regret, in mostly student samples, so this research does not mark where ordinary mood repair ends and harmful spending begins.
Where it comes from
Cynthia Cryder, Jennifer Lerner, James Gross and Ronald Dahl, 2008 (Misery is not miserly). Selin Atalay and Margaret Meloy, 2011 (Retail therapy: a strategic effort to improve mood)