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The best remedy for sadness is
not shopping, a recent study warns. The so-called retail therapy has become a
common practice these days, but that poses a serious threat to one’s wallet, so
if you’re sad and feel like shopping, don’t!
According to the study that will
be published in the June 2008 number of Psychological Science, sadness leads to
ego-centrist thinking. In other words, a sad person tends to transform into a
shopaholic, willing to spend extra money on the same item than neutral-emotion
people would buy for a lot less.
“It is the combination of
sadness and self-focus that drives the effect, and it turns out that sadness
leads to an increase in self-focus,” said Cynthia Cryder, co-author to the
study, AFP quotes. “What we think is going on is that sad and self-focused
people are feeling pretty bad about themselves and have a decreased valuation,
and one way to do this is by acquiring material goods.”
In an ideal situation, when you
know you’re sad, you should avoid making decisions and spending money. Sounds simple?
Unfortunately, it is not. Most people don’t even know they’re sad, the study
shows, and they are not aware that their feelings influence their decisions.
Dr. Carole Lieberman, also
studying the compulsive shopping disorder, said: “The way I discovered it was
because I was treating a lot of eating disordered patients at the time, and
found that after I cured their eating disorder, they developed a compulsive
shopping disorder,” abcnews.go.com reported.
What to do? The study, which was
released Friday at the annual meeting if the Society for Social and Personality
Psychology, showed that volunteers asked to watch a tragic video were more
likely to offer up to three times more money for a simple bottle of water than
volunteers who watched a neutral clip. The solution: well, for starters, don’t
go shopping! And if you can’t help it, it’s probably better to see a therapist.
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