When Guilt Begets Pleasure: The Positive Effect of a Negative Emotion

Understanding how emotions can affect pleasure has important implications both for people and for firms’ communication strategies. Prior research has shown that experienced pleasure often assimilates to the valence of one’s active emotions, such that negative emotions decrease pleasure. In contrast, the authors demonstrate that the activation of guilt, a negative emotion, enhances the pleasure experienced from hedonic consumption. The authors show that this effect occurs because of a cognitive association between guilt and pleasure, such that activating guilt can automatically activate cognitions related to pleasure. Furthermore, the authors show that this pattern of results is unique to guilt and cannot be explained by a contrast effect that generalizes to other negative emotions. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for marketing and consumption behavior.