This chapter examines how the original tenets of the affect-as-information hypothesis can be extended to explain a wide range of judgment phenomena, especially with respect to consumer decision making. To this end, research within social psychology as well as research from other fields such as...

In the intervening years since publication of the chapter Affect and Consumer Behavior (Cohen & Areni, 1991) in the Handbook of Consumer Behavior (Kassarjian & Robertson, 1991), research in consumer behavior dealing with affect has exploded, making it one of the field's central research topics....

It has been observed that ad-evoked feelings exert a positive influence on brand attitudes. To investigate the empirical generalizability of this phenomenon, we analyzed the responses of 1,576 consumers to 1,070 TV commercials from more than 150 different product categories. The findings suggest...

Previous research has shown that processing fluency leads to higher aesthetic pleasure. We propose that the effect of fluency on aesthetic pleasure relates to fluency’s role in reducing uncertainty. In other words, uncertainty is a drive state that produces pleasure only once it is resolved....

Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of human life. How do states of uncertainty influence the way people make decisions? We advance the proposition that states of uncertainty increase the reliance on affective inputs in judgments and decisions. In accord with this proposition, results from six...

Is the perceived value of things an absolute measurable quantity, as in economists’ notion of ‘‘cardinal utility,” or a relative assessment of the various objects being evaluated, as in economists’ notion of ‘‘ordinal utility”? We believe that the answer depends in part upon...

Consumer psychology faces serious issues of internal and external relevance. Most of these issues originate in seven fundamental problems with the way consumer psychologists plan and conduct their research — problems that could be called “the seven sins of consumer psychology.” These seven...

This article provides a critical review of what is known about affect regulation in relation to consumption behavior. Based on numerous findings from psychology, communication research, and consumer research, we identify a core set of general principles of affect regulation in consumer behavior....