Have you ever had a long, bad day and suddenly found yourself whipping out your credit card to purchase that jacket from last season, even if it's the peak of summer? Not exactly logical, huh?

But this retail therapy could actually make sense (a phenomenon that this writer is all too familiar with herself), says researchers from Carnegie, Mellon, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pittsburgh.

In a study conducted on 33 volunteers, the subjects were divided in two groups, the first being shown a video clip that showed grief after a tragic death, and the other that of a neutral clip from a nature show. After the viewing, they were made to buy a sporty water bottle, an item ordinary enough.

The results were that those who saw the sad video clip were willing to spend more cash on the water bottle. Much more in fact, that they even reached 300% more than the spending of those who saw the neutral clip.

Says Cynthia Cryder, a graduate student of Carnegi Mellon involved in the study, "The key contribution our paper adds to the literature is that a high degree of self-focus can carry over to spending."

What this study shows, therefore, is that people who feel bad tend to look for an outlet to make themselves feel better. While some people take it out by stuffing themselves with food, or with drinking, there are those who turn to spending on something that will make them look better on the outside in order to feel a tad more brighter on the inside.

"The two are related because they both deal with a way of filling up the emptiness inside that focuses on making their outside more attractive," explains Dr. Carole Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist that has studied compulsive shopping since the mid-1980s. "The way I discovered it was because I was treating a lot of eating disordered patients at the time, and found that after I cured their eating disorder, they developed a compulsive shopping disorder."

While some psychological experts believe that more research may be needed to draw solid conclusions, what remains true is that it is an interesting subject of study, this retail therapy is. With the help of studies concentrated on this subject, it is the hope of the researchers that  people will be able to make better decisions when it comes to their emotions and spending. It will, after all, hurt your wallet as well as your self-esteem.

So you boys out there, you might want to think twice before upsetting your girlfriends (whether intentionally or not). You just might end up shouldering their therapy, and you bet it's not gonna come cheap!

The study conducted will be published in the June 2008 edition of Psychological Science.