. Finally, Clark and Isen’s (1982) theory on mood-repair motives—the idea that people engage in certain behaviors, such as donating to charity, in order to relieve negative feelings—may hold implications regarding whether sad individuals want a smaller reward immediately or a larger reward later on (Cialdini, Darby, & Vincent, 1973). If that theory... See more

Our results suggest that individuals who are sad after the death of a family member might exacerbate their financial hardship by making intertemporal choices that favor immediate consumption more than is wise. Although the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has a “cooling-off rule,” giving individuals 3 days to cancel a sale, this rule excludes sales of... See more

Sad participants generated impatient thoughts significantly earlier (mean SMRD = .47, median SMRD = 1) than did neutral participants (mean SMRD = .03, median SMRD = 0; z = 2.65, p < .01) and disgusted participants (mean SMRD = .005, median SMRD = 0; z = 2.48, p < .05).

sadness may increase discounting by intensifying the salience of the current self.

Even though the induced sadness was incidental to these decisions, it actually increased preference for immediate rewards (compared with neutral emotion), whereas disgust did not.

Although sadness may make people more accurate in some contexts (Alloy & Abramson, 1979), it also makes them prefer immediate gratification—and that preference is not an attribute associated with wisdom.

a case can be made for a myopic-misery hypothesis , according to which sadness should increase impatience because sadness, arising from a sense of loss, triggers an implicit goal of reward replacement (Lerner, Small, & Loewenstein, 2004). Raghunathan and Pham (1999) found, for example, that sad individuals are biased toward high-reward, high-risk... See more

People typically make some of the most consequential choices of their lives while in emotional states. Love drives a decision to propose or accept marriage; anger drives a decision to strike someone; fear drives a decision to abandon one’s home in disaster. Sometimes a particular emotion holds inextricable links to a particular set of decisions.... See more

The data strongly support the prediction of query theory that sad people first generate reasons favoring the immediate reward (and thus generate more such reasons). Compared with neutral participants, sad participants generated a larger number of reasons supporting immediate receipt of the gift certificate early in the thought sequence, many of... See more