ABSTRACT
In the last two decades compulsive buying (CB) behavior has increasingly become a focus with consumer (e.g., d’Astous, 1990; Dittmar, 2005a,b;
Introduction 63 Compulsive Buying 64 Neural Basis of Compulsive Buying 66
Striatum (Nucleus Accumbens) 67 Ventromedial and Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex (vmPFC) 69 Insular Cortex 70
Method 71 Participants (Phase One) 71 fMRI Analysis (Phase Two) 72 fMRI Acquisition and Analysis 74 Postscan Analysis (Phase ˜ree) 74
Results 75 fMRI Product Phase Results (Hypothesis One) 75 fMRI Price Phase Results (Hypothesis Two) 75 fMRI Decision Phase Results (Hypothesis ˜ree) 75 Postscan Results 76
Discussion 77 Acknowledgment 80 References 80
2008; Scherhorn, Reisch, & Raab, 1990) and clinical researchers (e.g., Black, 1996; Koran, Faber, Aboujaoude, Large, & Serpe, 2006; Krueger, 1988; Lawrence, 1990; McElroy, Keck, Pope, Smith, & Strakowski, 1994; Mueller, de Zwaan, & Mitchell, 2008; Mueller & de Zwaan, 2008). Furthermore, CB has been generating growing interest among the general public. Along with popular science publications (Benson, 2009; O’Connor, 2005), and reports in various types of media (daily newspapers, magazines, radio, television, Internet), the movie “Confessions of a Shopaholic” (Bruckheimer, 2009) is illustrative of that interest. ˜e §rst comprehensive studies of CB were conducted by an American (Faber, O’Guinn, & Krych, 1987; Faber & O’Guinn, 1989), a German (Scherhorn et al., 1990), and a Canadian research group (d’Astous, 1990; Valence, d’Astous, & Fortier, 1988). Contemporaneously in the clinical-therapeutic literature there appeared individual case studies regarding the psychodynamic therapy of a€ected persons (Krueger, 1988; Lawrence, 1990). It has been observed that CB behavior is not a completely new phenomenon of our consumer society. Indeed the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and the Swiss psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler had already made reference to pathological desire to shop (buying mania) or oniomania (Kraepelin, 1909), which led to extreme levels of debt (Bleuler, 1924).
