Nostalgia, which is induced by reminiscing about a positive past experience, can counteract loneliness and promote prosocial behavior. However, the process of recalling and thinking about a nostalgic experience can have quite different effects. Because nostalgic experiences rarely reoccur, people are motivated to savor them by prolonging the time they reminisce about them. The tendency to savor these experiences generalizes to situations that participants encounter later, thus increasing consumer patience. For this effect to emerge, however, consumers must be aware that waiting will be beneficial to the attainment of a benefit. Moreover, the relationship between nostalgia and consumer patience is diminished when people perceive a nostalgic experience to be repeatable or when they intensify their memory of the experience rather than prolonging it. Eight studies confirmed these effects and processes that underlie them.

Feeling crowded in a shopping environment can decrease consumers’ evaluations of a product or service and lower customer satisfaction. However, the present research suggests that a crowded environment can sometimes have a positive impact on consumer behavior. Although feeling crowded motivates consumers to avoid interacting with others, it leads them to become more attached to brands as an alternative way of maintaining their basic need for belongingness. The effect does not occur (a) when the crowding environment is composed of familiar people (and, therefore, is not considered aversive); (b) when individuals have an interdependent self-construal (and consequently, high tolerance for crowdedness); (c) when people are accompanied by friends in the crowded environment; (d) when the social function of the brands is made salient; (e) when people have never used the brand before; or (f) when the brand is referred to as a general product rather than a specific brand.

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This research examines how incidental exposure to death-related information in the media affects consumers’ value orientation and scope sensitivity to marketing stimuli. Five studies demonstrate that, in contrast to thoughts about one's own mortality, exposure to death-related information in the media can shift consumers’ focus from extrinsic to intrinsic values. This leads them to pay less attention to the marketing stimuli, which are generally associated with extrinsic values, and consequently results in lower sensitivity to the magnitude of products and services. These effects are reversed when the marketing stimuli are associated with intrinsic values. Moreover, we found that exposure to death-related media information will generate effects similar to those of mortality salience when the information is perceived to be self-relevant and thus could induce death anxiety. The authors discuss implications and possible extensions.

Sleepiness, the subjective feeling of the propensity to fall asleep, is a common, everyday experience that can be induced by various factors, such as sleep quality, sleep deprivation, ingestion of certain substances, or belief about how much sleep a person needs. Despite its prevalence, sleepiness and its influence on consumption behavior have rarely been linked in the research to date. The present research helps fill this void by uncovering the novel impact of sleepiness on consumer variety-seeking behavior. The studies, using various methods and all involving consequential choices, revealed that sleepier consumers tended to seek more variety. The driver of this effect was found to be a need for arousal to maintain wakefulness. The authors also show that variety-seeking behavior is effective in partially reducing sleepiness. The effect of sleepiness on variety seeking uncovered in this research is somewhat nonintuitive, in the sense that, a priori, one might expect sleepiness to be more likely to decrease rather than increase exploratory behavior. The authors discuss implications of the findings for different research areas and for marketing practice.