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| How Sad Mood Affect Consumers’ Food Preference: The Moderating Effect of Attribution |
| DU Jiangang，ZHANG Yu，CHEN Yuxi |
| Nankai University, Tianjin, China |
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Abstract Drawing on the coping and attribution literature, the present study conducts three experiments to demonstrate that attribution is a key moderator that influences the type of coping (problem-focused vs. emotion-focused) people adopted after a failure and that it should also influence the food preferred by people in a sad mood. Specifically, when people in a sad mood perceive the failure to be internal attribution, they would retrospect the whole thing from a cognitive perspective in an attempt to avoid further losses in the future, and prefer healthy (vs. unhealthy) food which helps prevent further loss. By contrast, when people in a sad mood perceive the antecedent failure to be external attribution, they will prefer unhealthy (vs. healthy) food which helps divert their attention away from the failure and repair their sad mood.
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Received: 01 June 2018
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