The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology)

by Michael I. Norton

In particular, a number of distinct findings can be classified into motives related to (a) need for belonging, (b) need for self-expression, and (c) need for self-enhancement.

Thus, identity-signaling behavior motivated by the desire to enhance one's self-image can yield similar consequences to engaging in other self-regulatory behaviors, namely depletion of regulatory resources (Gal & Wilkie, 2010) and anger (Gal and Liu, 2011).

For example, when consumers are exposed to health messages that warn of the risk of heart disease due to obesity, some consumers “cope” with this stressful situation by making a plan to cut their daily food intake, while others cope by stopping themselves from being upset by distracting themselves from unpleasant thoughts due to the threatening health message.

In contrast, avoidance coping means that consumers make an effort to be away from the source of stress. For example, when a consumer feels stressed due to being overweight, the consumer may cope with stress by distracting himself or herself and refusing to think about it too much.

This literature has shown that extraversion and conscientiousness are associated with increased problem-focused coping and better adaptive outcomes, whereas neuroticism is associated with increased emotion-focused coping and less adaptive outcomes (see Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010, for a review).

trait-based anxiety (Raffety, Smith, & Ptacek, 1997), depression-related personality types (Keller, Lipkus, & Rimer, 2002), optimism (Brissette, Sheier, & Carver, 2002), and core self-evaluation (Kammeyer-Mueller, Judge, & Scott, 2009) affect the use of specific coping strategies (see Connor-Smith & Flachsbart, 2007, for a recent meta-analysis).

Consumers who feel ashamed due to their low literacy tend to restrict their choices to a safe and narrow set to cope with negative social evaluations (Adkins & Ozanne, 2005

while regret resulted in the use of emotion-focused coping (e.g., acceptance, positive reinterpretation).

consumers who felt threat emotions and high (low) self-efficacy were more likely to use expressive support-seeking coping (avoidant coping), while those feeling angry and highly self-efficacious tended to employ active coping.

The results indicate that participants with problem-focused coping construed objects or actions in subsequent tasks at a more concrete low level while those with emotion-focused coping construed objects or actions in the subsequent task at a more abstract high level.

First, the authors suggest that guilt is associated with high efficacy that leads people to rely on problem-focused coping aimed at taking actions to alter the stressful environment.

Conversely, shame is associated with low efficacy that activates tendencies to rely on emotion-focused coping strategies aimed at regulating one's emotional responses.