Michel Tuan Pham

Affect Monitoring and the Primacy of Feelings in Judgment

Multidisciplinary evidence suggests that people often make evaluative judgments by monitoring their feelings toward the target. This article examines, in the context of moderately complex and consciously accessible stimuli, the judgmental properties of consciously monitored feelings. Results from four studies show that, compared to cold, reason-based assessments of the target, the conscious monitoring of feelings provides judgmental responses that are (a) potentially faster, (b) more stable and consistent across individuals, and importantly (c) more predictive of the number and valence of people’s thoughts. These findings help explain why the monitoring of feelings is an often diagnostic pathway to evaluation in judgment and decision making.

Emotion and Rationality: A Critical Review and Interpretation of Empirical Evidence

The relation between emotion and rationality is assessed by reviewing empirical findings from multiple disciplines. Two types of emotional phenomena are examined—incidental emotional states and integral emotional responses—and three conceptions of rationality are considered—logical, material, and ecological. Emotional states influence reasoning processes, are often misattributed to focal objects, distort beliefs in an assimilative fashion, disrupt self-control when intensely negative, but do not necessarily increase risk-taking. Integral emotional responses are often used as proxies for values, and valuations based on these responses exhibit distinct properties: efficiency, consistency, polarization, myopia, scale- insensitivity, and reference-dependence. Emotions seem to promote social and moral behavior. Conjectures about the design features of the affective system that give rise to seeming sources of rationality or irrationality are proposed. It is concluded that any categorical statement about the overall rationality or irrationality of emotion would be misleading.

Promotion and Prevention Across Mental Accounts: When Financial Products Dictate Consumers' Investment Goals

We propose that consumers’ investment decisions involve processes of promotion and prevention regulation that are managed across separate mental accounts, with different financial products seen as representative of promotion versus prevention. Consistent with this hypothesis, we show that (a) investors are differentially sensitive to gains and losses and differentially risk seeking depending on the financial products being considered and (b) that these phenomena occur because of strong associations between financial products and promotion versus prevention. Therefore, investors’ goals may be determined by the investment opportunities under evaluation rather than being independent of these opportunities, as is assumed in standard finance theory.

When Arousal Influences Ad Evaluation and Valence Does Not (and Vice Versa)

This research examines, across 2 studies, the interplay between the valence and arousal components of affective states and the affective tone of a target ad. In the first study, music was used to induce a pleasant or unpleasant mood, while controlling for arousal. Participants were subsequently exposed to an ad that either had a positive-affective tone or was ambiguous in its affective tone. As predicted, the valence of the affective state colored the evaluation of the ad in a mood-congruent direction, but this coloring effect occurred only when the ad had an ambiguous-affective tone. In the second study, the target ad had a clear positive or negative affective tone, and the valence and arousal dimensions of the mood state were manipulated independently. As predicted, the arousal dimension, but not the valence dimension, influenced ad evaluation. Ad evaluations were more polarized in the direction of the ads affective tone under high arousal than under low arousal. This effect was more pronounced for self-referent evaluations (e.g., “I like the ad”) than for object-referent evaluations (e.g., “The ad is good”), favoring an attributional explanation—the excitation transfer hypothesis—over an attention-narrowing explanation—the dynamic complexity hypothesis. Taken together, the results of the 2 studies stress the important contingency of the affective tone of the ad, when examining the effects of the valence and arousal dimensions of a persons affective state on ad evaluation. The results also provide additional insights into how and when affect serves as information in judgment processes.

When Do People Rely on Affective and Cognitive Feelings in Judgment? A Review

Although people have been shown to rely on feelings to make judgments, the conditions that moderate this reliance have not been systematically reviewed and conceptually integrated. This article addresses this gap by jointly reviewing moderators of the reliance on both subtle affective feelings and cognitive feelings of ease-of-retrieval. The review revealed that moderators of the reliance on affective and cognitive feelings are remarkably similar and can be grouped into five major categories: (a) the salience of the feelings, (b) the representativeness of the feelings for the target, (c) the relevance of the feelings to the judgment, (d) the evaluative malleability of the judgment, and (e) the level of processing intensity. Based on the reviewed evidence, it is concluded that the use of feelings as information is a frequent event and a generally sensible judgmental strategy rather than a constant source of error. Avenues for future research are discussed.

Market prominence biases in sponsor identification: Processes and consequentiality

It has been recently suggested that sponsor identification may be biased in favor of prominent brands. All things equal, consumers are more likely to attribute sponsorship to brands that they perceive to be more prominent in the marketplace, such as large-share brands. This article offers additional empirical evidence for this phenomenon and examines the underlying processes. The results of a controlled laboratory experiment replicate the phenomenon and show that this bias arises only when consumers are unable to retrieve the name of the sponsor directly from memory. In other words, direct retrieval is the default process of sponsor identification. The prominence bias is therefore more likely to occur in cluttered media environments where learning the event-sponsor associations is difficult. The findings further suggest that this bias emanates from a relatively controlled hypothesis-testing process that combines retrieval and constructive processes. During identification, the prominence of the brand is used as a confirmation cue that either validates or conflicts with peoples vague recollections. The results also indicate that prominent brands identified or misidentified as sponsors do in fact benefit from enhanced brand image.

Affective reactions to consumption situations: A pilot investigation

Abstract The authors first attempt to clarify the affect terminology. Then, in an empirical study, they explore the affective reactions prompted by a wide range of consumption situations. For each of them, the authors investigate what preceeds, what happens during and what happens after the situation. 1,436 affective experiences, retrieved by 118 subjects in response to the proposed situations, were content-analyzed. The subjects reported more positive than negative affective reactions. These were essentially feelings, followed by evaluative affects. Very few extreme affective reactions were recollected. A greater variety of negative than positive affective reactions was reported. The clearest associations between consumption situations and affective reactions were: after vacation with nostalgia/sadness; voting with lack of concern; during a meal in a restaurant with cheerfulness or with bother; after a hobby purchase with positive excitement, shopping with irritation, and taking exams with scare. Throughout the paper, special attention was paid to gender differences.

Informational Properties of Anxiety and Sadness, and Displaced Coping

Replicating Raghunathan and Pham ( 1999 ), results from two experiments confirm that while anxiety triggers a preference for options that are safer and provide a sense of control, sadness triggers a preference for options that are more rewarding and comforting. Results also indicate that these effects are driven by an affect-as-information process and are most pervasive when the source of anxiety or sadness is not salient. Finally, our results document a previously unrecognized phenomenon we term displaced coping, wherein affective states whose source is salient influence decisions that are seemingly-but not directly-related to the source of these affective states. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Cue Representation and Selection Effects of Arousal on Persuasion

A popular prediction in persuasion research is that decreased ability to process information increases reliance on peripheral cues and decreases reliance on central claims. This article explains why this prediction does not necessarily hold when processing capacity is impaired by high arousal. Three experiments suggest that two types of processes underlie arousal effects on persuasion. Arousal induces selective processing of cues that are diagnostic at the expense of cues that are nondiagnostic--the selection effect. Arousal may also dilute the influence of cues that are capacity demanding--the representation effect. It is therefore important to disentangle the diagnosticity of persuasion cues from their processing demands. Copyright 1996 by the University of Chicago.

Search and alignment in judgment revision: Implications for brand positioning

The authors propose a model of judgment revision, which posits that counterattitudinal challenges to a brand initially trigger a memory search for proattitudinal information about the brand. The proattitudinal information accessible from memory is then aligned with information contained in the challenge in order to assess the diagnosticity of the challenge, that is, how much it “damages” the retrieved brand information. If the challenge is not perceived to be diagnostic, the retrieved brand information is used to defend the previous attitudinal position. If the challenge is perceived to be diagnostic, judgments are revised in direct proportion to the amount of damage identified in the alignment phase. Four experiments test the models predictions about the influence of abstract versus attribute-specific brand positioning on judgment revision. Consistent with the models predictions, results show that compared with attribute-specific positioning, abstract positioning will result in less judgment revision when the challenge is specific (e.g., a direct attack about particular attributes of the brand) and the initial brand evaluation is based on limited learning of the positioning information. When the challenge is general (e.g., a blanket, unspecific negative statement about the brand), abstract positioning will result in greater judgment revision than attribute-specific positioning will. The differential effectiveness of abstract versus attribute-specific positioning is mediated by (1) the accessibility in memory of the positioning information at the time of the challenge and (2) the perceived diagnosticity of the challenge after alignment with the retrieved brand information.