Memo to Mitt Romney: do not—I repeat, do not—try to get over your disappointment over your failed campaign by going shopping. Or buying a company. Or even buying stocks. If you do, you are likely to overpay by at least 300 percent.

A few years ago scientists caught up with what many women who have had their heart broken knows: there’s nothing like new shoes, or new anything, to lift your mood. Called retail therapy, the idea is that “comfort items” distract you from your sadness, or at least counterbalance it a little. But in 2004 scientists led by Jennifer Lerner, who is now at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, reported a worrisome relationship between heart strings and purse strings: feeling blue makes you willing to pay more for stuff. That ran counter to the prevailing view in psychology, namely that feeling lousy makes you devalue things. That is, when you’re blue neither a good movie nor a great dinner are as appealing as when you’re in a good or even a neutral mood.

Now she and colleagues think they have figured out why unhappy people tend to overpay. In a study to be published in June in the journal Psychological Science and that she is presenting tomorrow, February 9, at the annual meeting of the Society for Social and Personality Psychology, Lerner and her team find that thinking intensely about yourself—what they call self-focus—explains the connection between sadness and overpaying.

In their new study, the scientists recruited smart, quantitatively-oriented volunteers (that is, lots of Harvard students). Each volunteer received $10 just for showing up. Then each settled into a cubicle and watched a short film clip, either from a tearjerker (“The Champ”) or a neutral film (on the Great Barrier Reef). The first was meant to make them feel sad, the second to have no emotional effect. Finally, each participant wrote an essay, on how the film made them feel or on their daily activities, that the scientists analyzed for how many times self-y words like “I,” “me” and “my” appeared.

Then came the test. Each volunteer was given the chance to buy a sporty, insulated water bottle, at prices from $10 to 50 cents in 50-cent increments. Those who were made a little sad by the film, and who wrote self-centered essays, were willing to pay an average of $2.11 for the bottle. Those in a neutral mood paid 56 cents, barely one-quarter as much. Yet the volunteers who felt a little blue insisted their mood had no effect on their spending decision.

Lerner explains this “misery is not miserly” effect by invoking people’s need to make themselves whole. Sadness leads people to devalue their self image; they try to repair that by buying stuff, and are willing to pay more because making the self whole again matters so much. Why people don’t try to restore their sense of self and lift their mood by, saying, helping little old ladies across the street remains a mystery, though certainly a welcome one for the nation’s retailers.

Lerner doubts people can avoid this effect by, say, realizing that sadness will make them overpay. “If anyone should be able to think themselves out of this, it was our volunteers, who were all smart and very quantitative,” she says. But the volunteers denied that their mood had any effect on their spending decision. Instead, says Lerner, “all you can do is change the situation. If you’re feeling sad put some time between that and your decision to spend money. If you’re negotiating a price, don’t do it when you’re in a down mood.” Or, she says, take the focus off yourself and your misery by helping others—even that little old lady.

Say 'Om': With the Beatles in 1968. Photo: Getty Images

The other legacy the Maharishi, who died on Tuesday, gave the West is more controversial. In 1971 he founded Maharishi International University, in Iowa (now called Maharishi University of Management), which has become the center for studies of Transcendental Meditation (TM). Almost immediately—research papers on the benefits of TM appeared as early as 1974—scientists there began researching how TM affects everything from job satisfaction to blood pressure to anxiety.

There was just one problem. “Those early studies were extremely tendentious and just not of high caliber scientifically,” B. Alan Wallace, president of the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies, told me last fall.

In the early days, many studies compared people who meditate to those who do not. That made some of their conclusions suspect: if meditators have lower levels of stress than non-meditators, as studies found, that might be because only already-mellow people choose to meditate and stick with it, not because of the practice itself.

Still, it would be churlish to deny the numerous studies reporting benefits from TM. One found that learning TM reduced hypertension in older African-American men. Others reported that meditation can moderate the harmful effects of strenuous physical exercise on the immune system, that it can produce a feeling of euphoria akin to “runner’s high”, and that it reduced anxiety more than other relaxation techniques. Maharishi University regularly updates the list of research results.

But scientists are not fully convinced. It has been difficult to rule out an alternative explanation for apparent benefits such as reductions in stress, blood pressure and heart rate—namely, the placebo effect. If you expect an intervention, be it a pill or learning TM, to help you, it often does. If you are testing the benefits of a pill, you can give half your study subjects a dummy pill but not tell them, which can help control for the placebo effect. It’s pretty hard to hide from test subjects the fact that they are learning to meditate and then doing so for several hours a week. Perhaps it is the belief that TM will do wonderful things that produces benefits, not the actual meditation. That question remains very much up in the air.

Despite these concerns, the Maharishi and his American acolytes deserve credit for introducing the study of meditation to biology. Hospitals from Stanford and UCLA to Duke and NYU have instituted meditation programs to help patients cope with chronic pain and other ailments. Scientists unaffiliated with the TM movement have been emboldened to study the effects of other forms of meditation on diseases as different as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and psoriasis, all with impressive results. Whatever you think of the White Album, give the Maharishi credit for helping to launch what has become a legitimate new field of neuroscience.