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question: do all positive or negative emotions have the same influence on the nine-ending
price effect? To answer this question, Study 3 examined four emotional states that differ
along both valence and certainty dimensions: disgust (negative valence, certainty), fear
(negative valence, uncertainty), happiness (positive valence, certainty) and hopefulness
(positive valence, uncertainty). This allows us to simultaneously investigate how emotion
valence and certainty emotions can influence the nine-ending price effects. The findings
will examine the third hypothesis which predicts that higher certainty results in a greater
nine-ending price effect.
Participants
The sample comprised 160 undergraduate university students (72 females and 88
males with a mean age of 20.6 years and aged between 18 and 24) recruited from a large
southern university.
Design, Procedure, Stimuli, Processing Fluency and Emotion Induction
Study 3 used a 2 (valence: positive, negative) x 2 (certainty: certainty, uncertainty) x
2 (digit: nine and zero) between-subjects design and employed the same experimental
procedure and measure of processing fluency (α = .89) as those used in Study 1b. The
stimuli for Study 3 were the notebooks shown in Table 1. Smith and Ellsworth’s (1985)
manipulation was used in Study 3 for the same reason it was used in Study 2.
Certainty and Uncertainty in Emotions
Based on the investigations of Smith and Ellsworth (1985) and Tiedens and Linton
(2001), this study examined four emotional states that differ along both valence and
certainty dimensions: disgust (negative valence, certainty), fear (negative valence,
uncertainty), happiness (positive valence, certainty) and hopefulness (positive valence,
uncertainty). The participants in the disgust induction were told to focus on a negative
event that had made them feel disgusted (n = 40). In the fear induction, participants were
asked to remember, relive and vividly recall a negative event that had made them feel
scared (n = 40). Participants in the happiness condition were asked to recall a positive
event that had made them feel happy (n = 40). Participants in the fourth group were
instructed to recall a hopeful event (n = 40). After writing about these events, the
participants responded to three items taken from Smith and Ellsworth’s (1985) appraisal
questionnaire which assessed the certainty of the target emotion on a seven-point scale
ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (extremely). The three items asked the participants to rate
the degree to which they understood what was happening around them, how well they
could predict what would happen next, and how certain they were about what was
happening when they were feeling the target emotion (α = .87).