Maria Chiara Marchetti

Emotions and Choices: Does a Positive Mood Promote Thematic Versus Taxonomic Choices? Maria Chiara Marchetti

Thematic relations among products are becoming of central importance to marketing practices. This study aims at investigating the link between emotions and people?s choices to answer two research questions: Can people?s choices be influenced by manipulating their emotions? Are people?s emotions and their choices linked? An experiment is conducted to test whether a preference for thematic choices is related to individuals? positive moods. The experiment also assesses the effectiveness of mood inductions for positive and negative mood states. The experiment is about inducing different emotions in participants through music and recording their responses to two type of questionnaires to answer the research questions. The prediction is that consumers in positive mood states are more likely to think thematically. Results have shown that the link between emotions and choices is such that the higher people?s positive moods are, the higher their thematic choices.