Marketing Department

Nicole M Verrochi
Doctoral Candidate

Nicole’s research examines how people’s emotions, self-regulatory processes and social identities interact to influence persuasion and consumption. Her dissertation, and primary research area is concerned with emotion regulation: how and when do consumers change, control, or mold their ongoing emotional experiences? The first essay of her dissertation focuses on the specific strategy of attention deployment and asks how consumers regulate their emotions. By developing a unique experimental paradigm that captures attentional shifts in response to emotional stimuli, this work demonstrates that consumers strategically shift their attention toward and away from emotional content, but that the effectiveness of this strategy differs between emotions (e.g., fear versus sadness). These results offer a new perspective on emotion regulation, by explicitly considering whether certain regulatory strategies are more or less effective for certain discrete emotions.

In the second essay of her dissertation, Nicole asks when consumers want to change their emotional experience. Specifically, she finds that individuals social identities have associations to specific emotions (e.g., athletes are angry) and that these “emotion profiles” constrain the set of acceptable emotions a person can experience. This project addresses a gap between the emotion and identity literatures, and provides a new way to achieve identity-relevant positioning—by using emotion profile-consistent emotions in marketing communications.

Nicole’s other current projects focus on the influence of emotional expressions on victims’ faces in charity ads on consumer sympathy; how consumers’ emotional reactions to stockouts influence subsequent retaliatory decisions; and consumers’ desire to purchase products that feel authentic.

Her teaching experience includes Consumer Behavior and New Product Development, as well as TA-ing for Introduction to Marketing in the 2008-2009 school year. Nicole earned her BS in Economics (Marketing concentration) and her BA (Fine Arts) from the University of Pennsylvania.