Emotional License: Negative emotions as justification for self-regulation failure

Abstract

We propose that negative emotions do not always cause self-regulation failure by making us more impulsive; sometimes they are deliberately used as a justification to allow oneself a forbidden pleasure. We report two studies that investigated whether negative affect is used as license to indulge while ruling out direct emotion effects. Awareness of an emotional event was manipulated by inducing emotions either consciously or unconsciously. Only participants who were aware of experiencing a negative event would have a justification to indulge and would therefore eat more in a subsequent taste test while keeping negative affect constant in both conditions. Results indicated that, despite being equally emotional, participants highly aware of an emotional event indulged more in tasty but unhealthy snacks than participants less aware of the event (Study 1, N= 39). Furthermore, highly aware participants only consumed more of tasty but forbidden food, but not of equally palatable but healthy food (Study 2, N= 57). These findings suggest that a prototypical ‘hot’ state can lead to indulgent behavior in a more deliberate manner by employing negative emotions as a justification.