I’ve written in a previous post about when “retail therapy” can become an addiction-like problem known as Compulsive Buying. This month, as a result of the efforts of my past academic supervisor and his colleague, I have been fortunate enough to see published some of the results of research on Compulsive Buying that I conducted for my DPsych thesis. The paper, Experimental analysis of the relationship between depressed mood and compulsive buying, will be in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.
The paper reports results of two studies we conducted examining interaction between depressed mood and compulsive buying behaviour. Past research, largely using self-report questionnaires, has established that there is a relationship between depressed mood and compulsive buying. For example, a study by Faber and Christenson in 1996 found that 96% of people who buy compulsively thought that buying could alter their mood, in contrast to this belief being held among only 25% of the general population.
We wanted to see what we could find out about the relationship between mood and compulsive buying by using an experiment involving buying-related conditions, instead of simply asking people questions about their buying beliefs and behaviour.
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