The Experimental Research on the Influence of Materialism and the Emotion of Awe on Life Satisfaction and Products Preference

Ye Tian^1*, Dong Lu²

¹School of Economics and Management, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China.
²School of Business, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, China.

DOI: 10.4236/jss.2015.310020                

Abstract

The materialism plays a negative role in people’s life that if people have high materialism, normally they would show low life satisfaction and excessively pursue the material world but neglect the spiritual world. However, the emotion of awe, as a typical kind of positive emotions, can help people to raise their satisfaction in life and also promote people to approach the spiritual world. In this study, we used an experiment to investigate how the emotion of awe can offset against the negative impact from materialism on people. The results of the experiment indicated that if people experienced the awe emotion, no matter how high their materialism level were, they would increase their life satisfaction. And the people with high materialism would turn to prefer to the experience-based products when they acquired the emotion of awe.

Keywords

Materialism, Awe, Life Satisfaction, Products Preference

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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