When More Than One Negative Emotion is Elicited: How Suppressing or Expressing One Allows the Other to Raise its Ugly Head

An ad from an award-winning campaign for the World Wildlife Fund shows penguins rummaging through trash with the tagline “The future is man-made.” It suggests how, in the absence of human stewardship, greed and overconsumption are ruining the planet. Advertising like this is commonplace and typically elicits different emotions. For example, thinking about the plight of various species that are disappearing may elicit sadness. However, thinking about the actions that lead to this decline in biodiversity may elicit anger too. How do attempts to regulate these different feelings affect the downstream effects they can have? Although past research on affect has emphasized the need to examine different emotions (Raghunathan & Pham, 1999), much of this work does not address how exposure to stimuli that elicits more than one emotion (Lau-Gesk 2005; Williams & Aaker, 2002) has an impact on judgments of unrelated targets. For instance, in the example above, does sadness have an effect on subsequent unrelated judgments? Or are we more influenced by anger? Or, do both emotions exert an influence? And, under which conditions is the effect of each more dominant?