How Good Gets Better and Bad Gets Worse: Understanding the Impact of Affect on Evaluations of Known Brands

Participants experiencing positive or negative affect judged products described by brand and attribute information. Four studies using parameter-estimation and reaction-time procedures determined whether the impact of affect on brand name was the result of its influence on (a) participants' perception of its evaluative implications at the time of encoding or (b) the importance they attached to it while integrating it with other information to compute a judgment. Results showed that positive affect increased the extremity of the brand's evaluative implications (i.e., its scale value) rather than the importance (or weight) that participants attached to it. A fifth experiment demonstrated the implications of these findings for product choices made 24 hours after affect was induced.