Guilty feelings, targeted actions.

Early investigations of guilt cast it as an emotion that prompts broad reparative behaviors that help guilty individuals feel better about themselves or about their transgressions. The current investigation found support for a more recent representation of guilt as an emotion designed to identify and correct specific social offenses. Across five experiments, guilt influenced behavior in a targeted and strategic way. Guilt prompted participants to share resources more generously with others, but only did so when those others were persons whom the participant had wronged and only when those wronged individuals could notice the gesture. Rather than trigger broad reparative behaviors that remediate one's general reputation or self-perception, guilt triggers targeted behaviors intended to remediate specific social transgressions.

Informative inducement: study payment as a signal of risk.

In research involving human subjects, large participation payments often are deemed undesirable because they may provide 'undue inducement' for potential participants to expose themselves to risk. However, although large incentives may encourage participation, they also may signal the riskiness of a study's procedures. In three experiments, we measured people's interest in participating in potentially risky research studies, and their perception of the risk associated with those studies, as functions of participation payment amounts. All experiments took place 2007-2008 with an on-line nationwide sample or a sample from a northeastern U.S. city. We tested whether people judge studies that offer higher participation payments to be riskier, and, if so, whether this increased perception of risk increases time and effort spent learning about the risks. We found that high participation payments increased willingness to participate, but, consistent with the idea that people infer riskiness from payment amount, high payments also increased perceived risk and time spent viewing risk information. Moreover, when a link between payment amount and risk level was made explicit in Experiment 3, the relationship between high payments and perceived risk strengthened. Research guidelines usually prohibit studies from offering participation incentives that compensate for risks, yet these experiments' results indicate that potential participants naturally assume that the magnitude of risks and incentives are related. This discrepancy between research guidelines and participants' assumptions about those guidelines has implications for informed consent in human subjects research.

Misery is not miserly: sad and self-focused individuals spend more.

Misery is not miserly: Sadness increases the amount of money that decision makers give up to acquire a commodity. The present research investigated when and why the misery-is-not-miserly effect occurs. Drawing on William James's concept of the material self, we tested a model specifying relationships among sadness, self-focus, and the amount of money that decision makers spend. Consistent with our Jamesian hypothesis, results demonstrated that the misery-is-not-miserly effect occurs only when self-focus is high. That is, self-focus moderates the effect of sadness on spending. Moreover, mediational analyses revealed that, at sufficiently high levels, self-focus mediates (explains) the relationship between sadness and spending. Because the study used real commodities and real money, the results hold implications for everyday decisions, as well as implications for the development of theory. For example, economic theories of spending may benefit from incorporating psychological theories -- specifically, theories of emotion and the self -- into their models.