Feeling sad? stay away from the shopping mall!

According to researchers in the United States shopping may be a costly business if a person is feeling blue.

The researchers from Carnegie Melon University, Stanford University, the University of Pittsburg and Harvard University say people spend more when they feel down even though such feelings may be temporary.

The new study suggests that when a person is sad and self-absorbed their spending judgment is affected.

The researchers say previous research has indicated a possible a link between sadness and buying, and they were interested in exploring this.

The researchers asked a group of 13 female and 20 male volunteers to look at two types of randomly selected video footage, a 'sad' one and an 'emotionally neutral' one; the sad video was about the death of a boy's mentor.

They were then given the task of buying a basic commodity, such as a water bottle from a wide price range.

The researchers found that those who were assigned to the sad videos tended to offer nearly 300% more money than the neutral volunteers to buy the same type of commodity but were apparently unaware of the impact the sad videos had on their spending behaviours.

The researchers suggest that self-focus helps to explain the differing spending behaviours of the two groups and those who were highly self-focused and 'primed' to feel sad paid much more for commodities than those whose self-focus was low.

According to the researchers sadness and self-focus encourages us to devalue both our sense of self and our current possessions and this devaluation makes us eager to spend more money for new material goods as a way of enhancing our sense of self.

The researchers believe this affect may be even more significant in real life, as the low-intensity sadness induced in the experiment possibly underestimates the power of extreme sadness on spending behaviour.

They suggest such an effect may extend beyond the realms of shopping decisions causing people to take bigger stock-trading risks, or even to seek new relationships, while being completely unaware that these behaviours are being driven by emotions.

According to the researchers, sadness and a sense of self-focus can lead to silly spending and is a phenomenon that occurs without awareness.

Harvard professor Jennifer Lerner, who studies emotion and decision making, says this affect is different from the idea of retail therapy, where people are feeling negative and want to cheer themselves up by shopping because people have no idea this is going on.