Fighting your feelings: The impact of emotion regulation on consumer judgment and choice

Abstract

Consumers may regulate their emotional reactions toward marketing stimuli in order to depend less on their emotions to make product judgments and choices. However, this research suggests that, under certain conditions, regulating emotion may paradoxically increase the reliance on it. First, in experiment 1, I show that different emotion regulatory strategies (emotion suppression and reappraisal) require varying amount of cognitive resource. I then demonstrate that, as a result of its requisite cognitive inputs, regulating emotional reactions may impair consumers' ability to process product information systematically (experiments 2 and 3) as well as induce consumers to make emotion-based choices (experiments 4 and 5).