Using Online Retail Therapy to Reduce Lingering Sadness

Abstract

Prior research has suggested that ‘retail therapy’, or shopping to improve one’s mood, could be used to help reduce sadness through the mechanism of control restoration. Nonetheless, this phenomenon had merely been examined in traditional way of shopping. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether online shopping would have similar effects in reducing sadness, specifically in Thai undergraduate students. Hence, we hypothesized that online retail therapy would reduce sadness as well as there would be a difference between individuals in purchasing condition and those in browsing condition. We used a novel online shopping tasks and modified version of PANAS-X scale measuring both positive and negative affects in the study. The findings showed a significant effect of retail therapy in reducing sadness; however, there was no significant difference found between the two conditions. Future directions and implications were discussed.