The pleasure of possessions: affective influences and personality in the evaluation of consumer items

What is the role of affect in the way people perceive and evaluate their ma terial possessions? Participants induced to feel good or bad estimated the subjective and objective value of a number of consumer items they owned or wanted to own. Participants also completed the Openness to Feelings (OF) sc ale. As expected, mood had no effect on objective evaluations. However, we found a significant interaction between personality (OF) and mood on subjec tive evaluations. Individuals scoring high on Of showed a clear mood congru ent pattern: They made more positive evaluations of consumer items when in a positive rather than negative mood. In contrast, people scoring low on OF showed an opposite, mood-incongruent bias. Openness to Feelings moderated the mood effects regardless of whether the mood was induced using an autobi ographical or a video mood induction procedure, and regardless of whether t he items were owned or merely desired. The results are interpreted in terms of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for mood effects on consumer judgm ents, and the role of personality variables in moderating these effects is discussed. The implications of the findings for contemporary affect-cogniti on theories, and for our understanding of the variables influencing consume r judgments are considered. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.