Psychological evidence and casual intuition predict that sunny weather is associated with upbeat mood. This paper examines the relation between morning sunshine at a country's leading stock exchange and market index stock returns that day at 26 stock exchanges internationally from 1982-97. Sunshine is strongly significantly correlated with daily stock returns. After controlling for sunshine, rain and snow are unrelated to returns. There were positive net-of-transaction costs profits to be made from substantial use of weather-based strategies, but the magnitude of the gains was fairly modest. These findings are di#cult to reconcile with fully rational price-setting.

The O.J. Simpson “trial of the century ” in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s. A prominent football player and popular sportscaster was charged with a gruesome double homicide. The attorneys for the prosecution and defense were of various races and genders. The evidence presented on each side was at times amazingly simple, visual, and emotional, and at times was verbal, abstract, and probably incomprehensible to jurors. The witnesses included individuals of diverse styles, demeanors, and credibility. The jurors, the recipients of the messages from these various sources, were themselves a mixed group of people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal experiences who had to sift through the trial material and arrive at a decision as to whether the defendant had been proven guilty or not. The context in which all of this took place was at times tense and sad, and at times filled with humor and positive feelings. Not surprisingly, no experiment has ever captured the extraordinary complexity inherent in this situation, yet almost all of the variables present in this trial (and many not present) have been examined in the social psychological literature on attitude formation and change. This chapter provides an overview of research on these diverse variables and addresses the processes by which these variables are thought to result in influence. Although it has become a cliché to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable concept in

The primary objective of this article is to examine the impact of preconsumption affect on consumers ’ postpurchase evaluations. More specifically, we wanted to investigate how the two basic dimensions of affect—pleasure and arousal—contribute to customer evaluations of different types of services. To test our hypotheses, four service settings reflecting the quadrants in Russell’s Circumplex Model of Affect were chosen. Data were collected at two points of time: at the preprocess stage and immediately after the core service delivery. The results of this study suggest that pleasure and arousal, the two dimensions of emotional responses to the preprocess service environment, may interact in determining postpurchase evaluations. The interaction effect was observed for global satisfaction judgments and for repeat purchase behavior, thus suggesting that the combined effects of arousal and pleasure need to be considered in the design of preconsumption service settings. � 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Recently, the study of consumption-related emotions has received increasing attention from consumer-behavior researchers (Richins, 1997). Affective reactions to consumption stimuli deserve specific study because consumer emotions may be as essential as cognitive processes to

Abstract: We describe an experiment studying the effectiveness of persuasive digital documents, taking mood, exposure time and site design into account. Participants in either a neutral or a positive mood were confronted with a persuasive site. These sites could either be “content only ” or “content plus ” (the latter using some of the information presentation possibilities offered by digital documents). In addition, in a limited exposure condition, participants were given a restricted time to visit the site, while in the unlimited condition, participants were allowed to spend as much time on the site as desired. The results of the experiment showed that both mood and site design had a strong effect on attitude change, while exposure time did not. Participants in a positive mood were more inclined to change their attitude in the direction of the advocated position than participants in a neutral mood. And, participants visiting a content-plus site were more inclined to change their attitude than participants visiting a content-only site. Interestingly, there was an interaction between these two factors, to the effect that the presence of additional information presentation cues was particularly effective for participants in a positive mood.

This paper begins to answer the call to broaden current theories of individual decision-making by including in them the effects of human mood. Grounding our arguments in psychological literature on the effects of mood on information processing, motivation, and decision heuristics, we develop hypotheses about how mood can significantly affect individuals' use of structured decision protocols. In support of our hypotheses, results from an experimental study of complex decision-making suggest that, in situations where a structured decision protocol is the usual method of decision-making, individuals in moderately negative moods are significantly more likely than those in moderately positive moods to: (1) carefully execute all the steps of a structured decision protocol, (2) execute the steps of a structured decision protocol in the correct order, and (3) rely on the outcome of the structured decision protocol as the primary basis for the decision. We discuss these findings in terms of the...

and the Emotions Evolutionary psychology is an approach to the psychological sciences in which principles and results drawn from evolutionary biology, cogni-tive science, anthropology, and neuroscience are integrated with the rest of psychology in or-der to map human nature. By "human nature," evolutionary psychologists mean the evolved, reliably developing, species-typical computa-tional and neural architecture of the human mind and brain. According to this view, the functional components of this architecture were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ances-tors, and to regulate behavior so that these adaptive problems were successfUlly addressed (for discussion, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psy-chology is not a specific subfield of psycholo-gy, such as the study of vision, reasoning, or so-cial behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it-including the emotions. The analysis of adaptive problems that arose ancestrally has led evolutionary psychologists to apply the concepts and methods of the cogni-tive sciences to scores of topics that are relevant to the study of emotion, such as the cognitive processes that govern cooperation, sexual at-traction, jealousy, aggression, parental love, friendship, romantic love, the aesthetics of landscape preferences, coalitional aggression,

Emotional facial expressions are ubiquitous yet potent social stimuli that can signal favorable and unfavorable conditions. Previous research demonstrates that emotional expressions influence simple preference judgments and basic approach-avoidance behaviors. Here, we examined whether emotional expressions can influence complex decisions such as choices between gambles. Based on theoretical models of affective cue processing, we predicted greater risk taking after positive than negative expressions. This hypothesis was tested across three tasks that varied in implementation of risks, payoffs, probabilities, and temporal decision requirements. In all three tasks, the likelihood of a risky choice was greater after exposure to positive versus negative expressions. Similar effects on risky choice occurred after presentation of different negative expressions (e.g., fear vs. anger), suggesting involvement of general positive and negative affect systems. These results highlight that incidental socioemotional cues have a valence-specific influence of on decisions, and have important implications for risktaking behavior in social situations. Faces and Gambles- 3 The question of how emotions influence decisions has a long history in psychology,