Anthony Salerno

Life-History Strategy, Food Choice, and Caloric Consumption

Do people’s perceptions that they live in a harsh environment influence their food choices? Drawing on life-history theory, we propose that cues indicating that the current environment is harsh (e.g., news about an economic crisis, the sight of people facing adversity in life) lead people to perceive that resources in the world are scarce. As a consequence, people seek and consume more filling and high-calorie foods, which they believe will sustain them for longer periods of time. Although perceptions of harshness can promote unhealthy eating, we show how this effect can be attenuated and redirected to promote healthier food choices.

Hedonic Eating Goals and Emotion: When Sadness Decreases the Desire to Indulge

This article uses the functionalist perspective of emotion to demonstrate that the influence of sadness on indulgent consumption depends on the presence of a hedonic eating goal. Sadness heightens a persons sensitivity to the potentially harmful consequences of indulgent consumption, which decreases indulgence when a hedonic eating goal is salient. As sadness is often associated with a loss, this protective function is geared toward preventing future losses. The execution of this function is mitigated by feelings of safety, a counterforce to concerns about the harmful consequences of goal pursuit. Alternatively, when a hedonic eating goal is not salient, or a salient goal does not have harmful consequences, sadness results in emotion regulation (i.e., indulging as a means of feeling better). This conceptualization and findings show that the effects of emotions on indulgent consumption can be goal-dependent, and that emotions can aid consumers in the balancing of long-term goals and well-being.

Exploring the Differences Between Conscious and Unconscious Goal Pursuit

People can be aware (conscious) or unaware (unconscious) of an active goal when making a choice. Being aware of a goal enables people to use conscious strategies to identify attributes that are relevant to goal pursuit and to assess the efficacy of the attributes of each choice alternative. For most people, this process encourages the choice of the most goal-consistent alternative. For some people, this process encourages the consideration of trade-offs, activates a competing goal, and encourages the choice of a goal-inconsistent alternative. With unconscious goal pursuit, people cannot devote resources to assessing the efficacy of the attributes of each alternative; therefore, they match the accessible goal to the attributes of the available alternatives. As a result, the unconscious selects an alternative with attributes that are consistent with the goal and not necessarily the alternative that is most efficacious for the goal. The authors investigate these processes by manipulating the conscious systems ability to assess the efficacy of product attributes and the unconscious systems ability to match the accessible goal to product attributes.

Anger Promotes Economic Conservatism

Research suggests that certain facets of people’s political ideals can be motivated by different goals. Although it is widely accepted that emotions motivate goal-directed behavior, less is known about how emotion-specific goals may influence different facets of ideology. In this research, we examine how anger affects political ideology and through what mechanisms such effects occur. Drawing on the dual-process motivational model of ideology and the functionalist perspective of emotion, we propose that anger leads people to support conservative economic ideals, which promote economic independence and discourage societal resource sharing. Four studies support our hypothesis that anger can enhance support for an election candidate espousing conservative economic ideals. We find that anger shifts people toward economic conservatism by orienting them toward competition for resources. Implications and future research on the relationship between emotions and political ideology are discussed.