To Save Money, Pay Attention to Your Mood

New York Magazine:

In this chaotic and uncertain world, there are still a few things we can count on to happen each December. The air will turn colder. There will be some outrage about the design of some chain’s holiday cups. And in the last couple weeks of December, stressed-out procrastinators will elbow their way through crowded stores, cursing themselves for not doing their shopping earlier and miserably calculating how much of their paycheck will be left once the season of spending passes.

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As Scientific American noted, much of the research on mood and consumption is the work of Jennifer Lerner, who co-founded Harvard’s Decision Sciences Laboratory. In a 2008 study in the journal Psychological Science, for example, Lerner and her colleagues found that sad participants were willing to shell out more for an item than those in a neutral emotional state.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine