Emotion-linked shopping in digital media environments: a regulatory process framework with implications for adolescents and emerging adults

Shopping is now embedded in social media feeds, influencer content, livestreams, entertainment, and everyday smartphone use. These hybrid media-commercial environments make browsing and purchasing readily available when distress, boredom, identity concerns, or social needs arise. Research on this topic is divided across retail therapy, compensatory consumption, impulse buying, digital emotion regulation, and compulsive buying-shopping disorder, and the presence of emotion is often treated as evidence that regulation has occurred. This critical narrative review integrates these literatures while separating emotional antecedents, regulatory intentions, changes in emotion, behavioral control, and longer-term consequences. Literature was identified through seven search sources supplemented by backward and forward citation chaining. The clearest experimental evidence concerns temporary restoration of control through choice, whereas developmental evidence is dominated by cross-sectional studies. Evidence that low-friction payment or recommender systems alter emotion-shopping sequences comes mainly from adult consumer research and general digital-commerce research and is therefore treated as indirect for adolescents and emerging adults. We develop a media-amplified regulatory-process framework in which regulatory demand is followed by shopping-affordance appraisal, enactment across multiple shopping stages, immediate and delayed outcomes, and learning that shapes later strategy selection. Regulatory narrowing is proposed as a domain-specific extension of regulatory-flexibility theory: shopping occupies an increasing share of a person’s coping repertoire as alternatives become less accessible and platform feedback makes consumption easier to repeat. The framework also specifies intensive longitudinal approaches for testing within-person change and visually distinguishes the hypothesized recursive recommender-feedback pathway from the organizing process sequence. The review identifies major gaps in temporal inference, developmental sampling, measurement alignment, cultural generalizability, and platform-sensitive research.