EmoBlog

Are there such people as professional “analogists?”  These would be experts at coming up with powerful analogies to help people understand complex or misunderstood notions.  If there are such people, I could certainly use one.  I’m trying to come up with the perfect analogy to communicate how cognitive processing and emotional processing are not separate paths to decision making and behavior.  They necessarily work together.

The best that comes to mind is a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (RPBC).  Its optimum “effect” (i.e., taste) needs both chocolate and peanut butter.  Yes, some effect would be produced with just the chocolate.  And some effect would be produced with just the peanut butter.  But the intended effect — its unique taste — needs both.

Just like chocolate and peanut butter necessarily combine to produce RPBC’s optimum effect, cognitions and emotions necessarily combine to produce humans’ optimum decisions and behavior — decisions and behavior intended to optimize one’s well-being.  And they do so automatically as the result of how we’re neuro-biologically constructed.  (There are many terms for “neuro-biologically.”  By this I simply mean how our bodies, including our brains, are physiologically, chemically, and neurologically constructed and programmed to operate.)

At least in one sense, the RPBC analogy is not perfect.  In the cognition/emotion synergy, it appears that there is some linearity.  Emotions appear to have the final say in driving our decisions and behavior.  They provide the value that informs our decision/behavior mechanisms what to do.  Yes, behavior occurs if emotional processing is dysfunctional.  But that behavior has a strong likelihood to be dysfunctional, too.  It’s not correlated with optimum well-being.  Many neuroscientists and psychologists have shown this, chief among them probably Antonio Damasio.

But I digress.  I’m getting away from the main point of this article.  Let’s assume you accept the necessary synergy of cognitive and emotional processing.  In this article, I’d like to share a little of what many researchers are finding about how emotions affect cognitive processing and what this might mean for marketing toward desired consumer behavior.

Although many articles support the information to follow, I draw heavily upon two:

• Affective Influences on Cognition: Mood Congruence, Mood Dependence, and Mood Effects on Processing Strategies.  Joseph P. Forgas and Eric Eich in A.F. Healy & R.W. Proctor (Eds.), Experimental Psychology.  Volume 4 in I.B. Weiner (Editor-in-Chief), Handbook of Psychology. New York: Wiley.  January  2011 (in press).

• Affective Arousal as Information: How Affective Arousal Influences Judgments, Learning, and Memory.  Justin Storbeck and Gerald L. Clore.  Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2/5 (2008).

Each article provides dozens of others supporting these points.

The first point to be made from these articles is that in fact emotions (AKA affect and feelings) do impact our cognitive processing — i.e., how we “think” about things.  And cognitive processing includes what we attend to, what we learn and remember, and the judgments and evaluations we make about things in our worlds.

The second point is that emotions’ impact on cognitive processing can be conscious or unconscious.  We don’t have to be aware of how we’re feeling about things for emotions to impact cognitive processing.  (This is a point I’ve made many times in my articles, but it bears repeating here.)

The third point is that emotions impact cognitive processing from two of their defining characteristics – valence (whether the emotion is positive or negative) and arousal (in the vernacular, the strength of the emotion).  (Note: Storbeck and Clore define arousal in more specific terms, but strength serves our purposes here.)

The points just made are higher-order.  Getting more specific, here are the main points these articles make.  (Please note that I’ve taken the liberty to substitute “affect” for emotion because some of these effects refer to moods instead of, or as well as, more acute emotional reactions.  For the purposes of this article, I think affect is a reasonable surrogate.)

Positive affect generally activates relational cognitive processing, meaning that we assess how things generally relate to one another, placing less importance on discriminating details.  On the positive side this leads to…

• Less cognitive effort
• Seeing all things more positively
• Remembering more things (but not more accurately)
• Greater creativity

However, on the negative side this leads to…

• Less attention to detail
• Less accurate memory
• Greater bias
• Greater gullibility

Negative affect generally activates item-specific cognitive processing, meaning that we assess the specific details of stimuli, being much more scrutinous.  On positive side this leads to…

• More attention to detail
• More accurate memory
• Less vulnerability to deception

However, on the negative side this leads to…

• Greater cognitive effort
• Over analysis at times
• Greater skepticism
• Greater argumentation

Regarding the effect of arousal, Storbeck and Clore make the point that arousal generally augments the effects of valence.  For instance, where negative affect is associated with enhanced memory for details, stronger negative affect is associated with even stronger memory for details.

It’s important to point out that these relationships are generalizations.  They don’t always apply.  Both articles point out moderating conditions.  For instance, one’s personality traits, one’s personal goals, and the degree to which pre-existing responses have been programmed over time can override these general effects.  However, it can be valuable to know that, generally speaking, these effects do apply.

Now perhaps what you’ve been waiting for.  How can this apply to marketing toward desired consumer behavior?  Well, here goes (with the caveat that I have not specifically found research studies that directly support these points; here they simply serve as hypotheses):

Induce some sort of positive affect along with your product/service message if you want targeted consumers to…

• Simply feel good about your product/service without any details;

• Not question your proposition and continue to agree with what they already believe or how they currently behave (e.g., brand loyalty);

• Be more creative in inventing solutions.

However, induce some sort of negative affect along with your product/service message if you want targeted consumers to…

• Pay attention to the details of your product/service;

• Question past propositions and change their minds about what they already believe or how they currently behave (i.e., brand switching);

• Be more discriminating in determining solutions.

Finally, with either induced affective state (positive or negative), add intensity (i.e., arousal) to augment these effects.

Returning to the RPBC analogy, I guess it’s literally too simple.  How beautiful if the emotion/cognitive processing relationship was as consistent as the delicious flavor of chocolate and peanut butter.  But please realize that the foundation is similar.  The two work together, not separately, to produce a wonderful, desired effect. 

As always, comments are certainly welcome.  Until next time…

Many recent scientific studies show that sensory performance, particularly seeing and hearing, is enhanced when stimuli are emotionally arousing.  Yes, it appears that we literally see and hear better after being exposed to emotional (vs. non-emotional) stimuli.

For instance, in Emotion Facilitates Perception and Potentiates the Perceptual Benefits of Attention (2005), Phelps et al. induced fear in respondents (with validly proven fearful faces) and then tested their (early) vision (particularly “contrast sensitivity”).  They found that indeed respondents who had been fear-induced (vs. neutral-induced) were more sensitive to contrast.

In somewhat of a review of this topic, Vuilleumier in How Brains Beware: Neural Mechanisms of Emotional Attention (2005) cites and explains evidence that emotion(s) “not only serve[s] to record the value of sensory events, but also to elicit adaptive responses and modify perception.”  (‘Modifying perception’ here refers to sensory perception rather than cognitive perception.)  Vuilleumier provides a mechanical, neural explanation for sensory improvement, implicating the amygdala as a central neural hub.  In addition, and for the purposes of this article, Vuilleumier cites studies that show sensory improvement not only for vision, but also for hearing and smelling.  Also cited are similar results for positive emotions, particularly happiness.

Regarding hearing, in Effects of Emotional Prosody on Auditory Extinction for Voices in Patients with Spatial Neglect (2007), Grandjean et al. found that auditory accuracy was enhanced for emotional vs. non-emotional utterances for a special group of disabled people (more on that in a minute).

Much of this research investigates whether emotion’s sensory enhancement is the result of emotion summoning attentional resources.  In other words, do we see and hear better via emotion because emotion enhances attention to the stimuli?  The answer seems to be partly, but not entirely.  Studies are showing that emotional processing both organizes attentional resources, but can also unconsciously bypass attention to enhance perceptual abilities.

For instance, in their article (cited above) Phelps et al. say “the present results indicated that the effects of emotion and attention on early vision are not simply additive; rather, the joint effect of emotion and attention demonstrates that emotion potentiates the perceptual benefits brought about by transient attention.”

Returning to the Grandjean et al. article, their respondents were chosen because they had a specific attentional dysfunction.  This allowed the researchers to see whether emotion could still enhance hearing.  They found that indeed it could.  Therefore, they concluded that “our results are consistent with the hypothesis that some mechanisms for ’emotional attention’ may still operate despite perceptual extinction and attentional deficits that result from parietal lesions.”

Further confirmation of emotion’s enhancement of sensory perception (and therefore awareness) comes from Anderson in Affective Influences on the Attentional Dynamics Supporting Awareness (2005).  In series of studies involving the phenomenon of “attentional blink” (AB; being unaware of [i.e., missing] a quickly presented second stimulus following a first stimulus), Anderson demonstrated that AB was lessened when second stimuli were emotionally arousing.  Therefore, second emotional stimuli more readily entered into awareness.  Furthermore, Anderson showed that the arousal value of emotional stimuli was the key feature at work, rather than its valence (i.e., positive or negative quality).  

Many other studies on this topic exist, but being short on space, let me summarize the main points for marketing and consumer/marketing research purposes.

1.  Emotional stimuli, both positive and negative, trigger neurological processes that enhance our sensory abilities.  In many cases, we certainly see better, but also hear and (possibly even) smell better.

2.  This emotional-sensory enhancing process is in part due to summoning attention to the stimuli (and/or the environment around it), but not entirely.  The emotional influence (toward awareness) exists even without conscious attention to the stimuli. 

For consumerism, these results direct us to make and promote our products, services, brands, etc. in ways that are more emotionally engaging.  Since consumers are inundated with consumer stimuli (including advertising of all types), those that are more emotionally engaging will literally gain more sensory attention & awareness and thus have a better chance of having the intended impact.  Using a well-worn advertising term, they will be less likely to get lost in the “clutter.”

Perhaps this was a long way to arrive at a familiar, well-accepted place.  Few would disagree that emotional marketing is better than non-emotional marketing.  Or would they?  Many marketers still pooh-pooh emotionality by naively believing that ”practicality” and “rationality” are really what drives people to buy their products and services.  “Just the facts, maam” or “don’t let your emotions drive your decisions” might be their mantras.  It’s high time that emotion is correctly understood as a natural, necessary part of the decision process that serves any degree of rationality.  And it’s research like this that helps us see how emotion does its work — in this case, by improving and, as Phelps writes, “potentiating” myriad sensory, attentional, and awareness-generating processes critical to people’s (including consumers’) decision-making.

(All that said, I certainly just scratched the surface here.  I welcome elaboration from others – confirming or refuting.)

This is my first in a series of five blog articles that address how specific aspects of emotion impact consumer behavior.  I start with one of the more basic aspects, and one that I’ve written about, spoken about, and work to address in my research.  For some of you, this will be a redundant review (so forgive me).  For others, it may be a refreshing new insight.  Mostly for the latter group, please know that…

What does this mean, really?  It’s pretty simple.  Much “emotional processing” occurs without our awareness.  By emotional processing I mean how the neurochemical systems devoted to emotion in our bodies – most importantly our brains’ – react to stimuli in our external and internal environment.  I don’t want to turn this into a neuroscience review, but I’m talking about what happens in…

• Sensory components (e.g., seeing, hearing, and touching);
• Brain components in what’s referred to as the limbic system (e.g., the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus) and various cortical areas (e.g., the orbito frontal and insular cortices); and…
• Peripheral “biometric” components (e.g., breathing, heart rate, and skin conductance).   

(If you’re interested in this area, you can search for authors such as Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Jaak Panksepp, Mark Solms, or Joseph LeDoux.) 

When these systems react, they do so with the goal of guiding our decisions and behavior toward solutions that will optimize our well-being, be it at the most basic level of survival or just making sure we ultimately “feel” as good as we can.  The point of this article is that this “emotional influence” can and does happen without us even knowing it.  And that’s important because in order to fully understand why people do what they do, why they buy what they buy, we should use methods to assess these unconscious emotional influences.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying we’re never aware of what our true feelings are and how they’re affecting our decisions and behavior.  We can be and are.  However, often we’re fooled about what’s influencing us or we don’t want to admit emotional truths.  So to get the full picture, we need comprehensive (i.e., implicit and explicit) emotional assessment.

Many studies demonstrate that emotions can and do operate unconsciously to affect our behavior.  I’m sure the numbers are in the hundreds, if not the thousands.  I’ll cite three.

Supporting Study 1: Subliminal Priming Drives Beverage Choice.  In a research setting, Winkielman, Berridge, and Wilbarger (2005) measured how much of a certain beverage thirsty respondents drank and how much they said they were willing to pay for that beverage.  However, before they took these measurements, they subliminally (i.e., below levels of awareness) exposed half of these respondents to pictures of happy faces and the other half to pictures of angry faces.  In pre-tests, these faces were proven to evoke positive (the happy faces) or negative (the angry faces) feelings.  These researchers found that respondents that had been exposed to happy faces drank more of the beverage and said they would pay more for it than respondents who had been exposed to angry faces.  This was consistent with much other research showing that “goal-directed” people (in this study operationally defined as “thirsty”) more readily engage in, and are more positive toward, action that fulfills their goal when they are in good moods vs. bad moods.  Since the only difference between these two groups of respondents was their subliminal exposure to the happy or angry faces, and since explicit self-reports of how they were feeling were no different between the two groups, the research showed that the unconscious emotional manipulation was what caused the differences in the amount drunk and how much they would be willing to pay for the beverage.

Supporting Study 2: Choosing Dasani Bottled Water.  Drawing upon Robert Zajonc’s classic work demonstrating that mere exposure to (vs. conscious deliberation of) a previously neutral stimulus is all that’s needed to develop an increased liking for it (liking being a positive feeling), Ferraro, Bettman, and Chartrand (2005) investigated whether increasing incidental exposure of a brand of water (Dasani) could unconsciously increase choice of that brand.  Showing respondents photos of people engaged in everyday activities, the researchers varied the number of photos that contained Dasani bottled water embedded within the photos.  (Note: The respondents did not know that choosing bottled water was the purpose of the research.)  Allowing respondents to choose different bottles of water as a ‘thank you’ for participating, they found that Dasani was chosen more than the other brands as the number of Dasani exposures were included in the photos.  However – and here’s the unconscious connection – this effect only happened for respondents who were not explicitly aware that Dasani was in the photos!  The research showed that additional exposures to Dasani led to greater unconscious liking for it and increased choice of it.

Supporting Study 3: Implicit “Loving” for a Frozen Food Brand.  Using the Emotional Profiling technique we developed, I and my colleague, Keith Payne, recently investigated the Emotional Profile of a frozen food brand.  Based on well-founded social/cognitive psychology methods, the technique measures how targeted respondents feel both ‘implicitly’ (i.e., without deliberate reflection) and ‘explicitly’ (i.e. with deliberate reflection) about the targeted object, in this case a frozen food brand.  When we examined which of the emotions (both implicit and explicit) in the brand’s profile most predicted share of purchase for that brand, we found that only feeling implicitly loving toward the brand significantly predicted this important outcome measure.  None of the emotions explicitly “felt” toward the brand had a significant impact on its share of purchase.

Most people, including marketers and marketing researchers, have a hard time believing that unless a consumer feels a certain feeling and can tell us about it, then it must not be affecting his or her behavior.  But the truth is that this isn’t always the case.  Emotions work “surreptitiously” to affect their behavior.  So, as I always do, I recommend always building ways to assess emotions’ ‘implicit’ (as well as explicit) impact on targeted consumer behavior.

So much for the first in this series.  Subsequent articles will discuss…

• How stronger emotional associations improve sensory processes.
• How emotional associations affect cognitive strategies – ways in which we think about things.
• How cognitive load affects emotions’ impact on behavior.
• How different methods of “emotional conditioning” affect preference for a brand or product.

Until next time…

This installment of Ask the Emotional Expert features John Nolte, Ph.D., noted psychodramatist and author of The Psychodrama Papers.  Dr. Nolte trained under J.L. Moreno, the founder of psychodrama.

Here’s what Dr. Nolte has to say about assessing consumer emotions via psychodrama.

Conner:  I always start out with this question: More and more we are learning that emotions drive humans’, and therefore consumers’, behavior.  What are your thoughts about that?

Nolte:  From a psychodramatic point of view, emotions are intentional.  That is, there is always some object to which the emotion is connected.  Basically, an emotion is triggered by a change in the situation in which we find ourselves.  As soon as we perceive ourselves facing a danger, for example, we experience fear not only as an emotion, but as a message concerning what we should do.  Fear tells us to get away from that which is perceived as dangerous.  So an emotion is an immediate evaluation of our situation and an instruction on what to do about it.  If we perceive a barrier between ourselves and a goal toward which we are moving, we experience anger (or one of the several variants of anger) and the instruction to get it out of the way.  If we perceive that something is of value, whether material like a diamond, or not so material as knowledge about something, the emotion aroused is desire which instructs us to possess it.  So I certainly consider emotion to be involved in every act, including the act of purchasing something.

Conner:  How do or would psychodramas work to get at emotions that drive consumers’ behavior?

Nolte:  Psychodrama is so flexible and creative that it is difficult to answer this question in a very specific way, to say that this is the way to do it.  What we know is that people do not act in a vacuum.  That is, every action is preceded by a warming up process, a period of preparing for the action of purchasing.  So a reasonable place to begin is to focus the respondents on a recent purchase, and a purchase which has something in common with that for which the research is being conducted.  For example, the director might ask a group (or individual) to recall the last time that they bought an automobile.  The director might then ask a willing member of the group to re-enact the actual purchase of the car.  In the process, he might ask the protagonist (respondent) to soliloquize the feelings he has as he drives the car away from the dealer.  A next step might be to ask: “When did the idea of buying this car first come into your mind?”  That event is explored and all the feelings involved elicited through psychodramatic techniques, largely for this purpose, soliloquy and doubling.  The director then guides the protagonist through all the steps which were taken psychologically and emotionally that led to the purchase of this specific car.  This could involve researching on the internet, talking with friends or spouse, all the positive emotions instructing him to buy, and the negative emotions instructing him otherwise; for example, “see if you can’t get a better price;” “maybe a different make would be better;” “maybe you can’t afford to buy just now…wait a little while;” etc.  The object is to consider all elements that go into the decision to buy.  In the process, it is quite likely that we would discover that many of the emotional reactions could be related to early experiences in one way or another.  These, too, can be explored and could yield valuable information about the development of attitudes related to the purchase of a car.

One could expect that participating in the psychodramatic action would warm other participants to their experiences, both common and different from those of the first protagonist.  These, too, can be re-enacted and the emotions elicited explored in depth.

It’s likely that however we start, we will discover unanticipated avenues to explore.

Conner:  Many would argue that traditional two-hour focus groups, especially with a good moderator, can do the same thing as psychodramas.  How would you respond to that?  Do you think psychodramas are more effective at uncovering emotions than traditional focus groups?

Nolte:  I doubt that anybody who has participated in a psychodrama would argue that a focus group is as effective as a psychodrama in eliciting both information and emotions.

The advantage of psychodrama over focus groups lies in the action techniques which psychodrama provides for accessing emotions at a deeper level. For example, setting a scene and re-enacting an event activates memory, and the emotions associated with it, in a more complete way, involving all the senses including kinesthetic ones.  Techniques such as soliloquy and doubling permit a detailed exploration of of the subject’s emotional state which almost always includes a mixture of emotions.  Psychodrama also allows for exploration of the subject’s history with emotions or emotional complexes.

So, it’s the action dimension of psychodrama which makes it more effective than the more passive modality of the focus group.

Conner:  What are some of the special techniques used within psychodramas that are especially effective at uncovering important emotions that drive consumer behavior?

Nolte:  “Setting the scene” anchors the protagonist in a concrete situation which includes all of the respondent’s previous experiences, including emotions.  Movement in this structured space enhances recall of both an experience and the emotions associated with that experience.  Psychodramatists know that memory is not simply a neurological process — it’s a neuro-muscular one.

“Soliloquy” involves inward focus on the bodily manifestations of emotion as well as on conceptualization which can arise from emotion as well as elicit emotion.

“Doubling” adds the assistance of another person in the search for emotional expression.

“Mirroring” and “role reversal” are two other highly useful techniques.

Conner:  Are psychodramas better conducted in group sessions or in individual sessions?

Nolte:  By and large, psychodrama in groups is more effective than when it is used individually.  There may be special circumstances which point to working with an individual. They are rare.  The group can be considered as a significant and integral aspect of the psychodramatic method, and a psychodrama can be considered as a product of group effort and collaboration.

Conner:  And how about the amount of time and number of respondents needed to make a group psychodrama most effective?

Nolte:  This is another flexible component of psychodrama. The most workable group is probably between 7 and 12 participants with 2½ to 3 hours for a session.

Conner:  What advice would you give consumer researchers who are interested in using psychodramas in their work?

Nolte:  Engage a well-trained, experienced psychodramatist who has experience working outside the field of psychotherapy and who is comfortable with non-therapeutic applications of psychodrama.

Conner:  Thank you very much, Dr. Nolte.  I know this from my experience, but you’ve neatly explained why psychodrama is a highly effective emotional assessment technique.

I admit it.  I just made that title up.  Sort of.

I did it for two reasons.  First, to get attention by leveraging some buzz words (particularly neuro) that seem to be everywhere these days in marketing.  Second, and most importantly, I made up the title to characterize a research technique that’s better at evoking and assessing compelling drivers of consumer behavior than traditional, dare I say, focus groups.

I’ll be honest.  I’m not fond of traditional focus groups.  That’s not to say that traditional focus groups have no value.  They can and do, especially when conducted by highly trained, highly skilled moderators for the right purposes.  But traditional focus groups are too often poorly conducted and/or applied.  Even when they are used for the right purposes (in short, developmental idea generation), they can fall short for a variety of reasons including insufficient time for building rapport, insufficient time for deep individual elaboration, social demand challenges, and problems with semantic memory to name a few.

If you are interested in conducting focus groups because you like to get targeted consumers together to open-endedly talk about targeted products or services (nothing wrong with that), I’d like to introduce you to an alternative –psychodramas.

Psychodramas involve respondents (called “protagonists”) re-enacting relevant behavior in a group setting.  They are led by a “director” (analogous to a focus group moderator) and include other group members as “auxiliaries,” the “audience,” and even, when called for, substituting for inanimate objects.

Like traditional focus groups, psychodramas offer the following…

• Opportunities to watch and listen to your targeted consumers in-person;
• Group interviewing in which respondents play off of each others’ comments;
• Opportunities to show products; and
• Opportunities to open-endedly explore deeper issues.

But, when conducted correctly by a highly skilled psychodramatist, psychodramas offer two benefits that focus groups can’t match, no matter how good the focus group moderator is:

• They naturally build stronger rapport (which gets more to the truth by creating comfort that mitigates defensive rationalizations).
• Most importantly (and here is the tie-in to this article’s title), they more readily “neuro-dynamically” activate and bring to the surface unconscious emotions and cognitions that drive consumer behavior.

Neuro-dynamically?  What the heck is that?  Again, a word I kind of made up.  But the word does reflect an accurate foundation.  The foundation comes from the fact that people’s past behavior, thoughts, and emotions are neurologically connected in their brains.  All three dynamics (behavior, thought, and emotion) are encoded together when they happen.  Some encoded associations are stronger and last longer than others depending on (among other things, I’m sure) repetition and significance to one’s well-being.  (Significance to one’s well-being is where emotions come into play.  Events that have more significance to one’s well-being receive stronger emotional encoding.)

Back to psychodramas, when people re-enact relevant events, they invoke the behavioral component of the original encoding, which activates the other components, including the emotional component.  Automatically, and often surprisingly because unconscious forces are unleashed, emotions and their associated cognitions surface and can be examined more deeply.

Tian Dayton, a renowned psychodramatist, put it nicely in her book The Living Stage: A Step-by-Step Guide to Psychodrama, Sociometry and Experiential Group Therapy:  “All action is motivated by some inner impulse.  …Behavior is, in a sense, concretized thought and emotion.”

Traditional focus groups lack the behavioral activation.  When people only talk about their experiences, their memories are all they have to draw upon.  However, when they actually re-enact their experiences, their ”action” forces emotional associations to emerge.  Yes, respondents can certainly manage these emotions — i.e., explain them away if they don’t want to talk about them when they become visible.  But this is less likely in a group situation with a good psychodramatist.  Why?  First, rapport is stronger, so respondents feel more comfortable sharing their feelings.  Second, emotions are more exposed, so attempts to explain them away become more difficult (again, particularly with an expert psychodramatist).  Third, many respondents don’t feel a need to hide them, so when they emerge, they are more than happy to share them with others, if not learn about them for themselves.

In short, psychodramas are not just an interesting, entertaining twist on interviewing people.  They have a functional advantage over traditional focus groups that is founded in how people are naturally “wired” to behave — i.e., through neuro behavioral-cognitive-emotional connections.

So I hope we are OK with the made-up title.  To read more about psychodramas, come back in the next week or so where I will feature a highly trained psychodramatist in the next installment of Ask the Emotional Expert.

(And please contact me if you would like to conduct psychodramatic research!)

Until next time…

This installment of Ask the Emotional Expert features Patricia Sunderland, Ph.D., anthropologist & founding partner of Practica Group, and co-author (with Rita Denny) of Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research (2007, Left Coast Press, Inc.).

Here’s what Patricia has to say about assessing consumer emotions via “anthropological ethnography.”

Conner:  More and more we are learning that emotions drive humans’, and therefore consumers’, behavior.  What are your thoughts about that?

Sunderland:  There is no question that emotions are a crucial force in human social life in general and for consumption in particular.  In fact, the notion that emotion could ever be abstracted from human thought and consumption — or that such a thing as human behavior exists in which emotion plays no role —  is in large part a result of the historical bifurcation of thought and emotion in Western intellectual traditions.  Thus also Western research traditions.  In terms of understanding consumption, it is a history best left behind.  Moreover, many of the best practices in consumer research take emotion, at least implicitly, into account.

Conner:  What are some techniques you use in your work — anthropological ethnography — to assess emotionality in consumer behavior?

Sunderland: First of all, in our work we incorporate and build on some of the established practices in qualitative research that have taken emotions implicitly into account.  For instance, we often use projective collages and other open-ended assignments as jumping off points for insight and conversation.  Second, in our ethnographic work, in our commitment to attend to the naturally-occurring, in-context unfolding of human action, we provide the space for emotion, thought, and action to naturally emerge and intertwine, and for our attention to attune to that intertwined constellation.  For us, embedded metaphors in language and nuances of word choice and ways of speaking are often among the clues we utilize for appreciating differences in emotional meanings and valence.  Finally, we have found video and audio diaries an enormously useful means of extending ethnographic inquiry in time and space, and the small size of digital audio recorders, which seems to foster a kind of intimacy for participants, has been an unexpected boost in garnering emotional details.  We have had great luck, for example, in asking participants to register tiny, tiny details of changes in moods as well as the minutiae of situations and circumstances that accompany those changes in moods with these recorders.

Conner:  What advice would you give consumer researchers who are interested in assessing consumer emotion?

Sunderland:  If there was one tip I would give, it would be to always keep the cultural and situational specificity of emotions in mind.  As a cultural anthropologist, I am deeply committed to the recognition that emotions and the expression of emotions are variable rather than universal. The sources of inspiration in the cultural terrain of emotion are the nuances and the differences, not the similarities.  Likewise, it is important to consider the context of the occurrence of emotions and the ways in which variations in emotional expression are dependent on context.  Just think about parents and children and the ways a parent’s emotions toward and for a child can depend on the moment — what the child has done as well as what is happening both for the parent and child. And even if there are overarching feelings, the emotions experienced in that moment depend on that particular moment and instance (which, as humans, includes memories of past experiences).  How experienced emotions are expressed is also context dependent. Where are the parent and child?  At school, at home, in the car, in the store?   And it is the same for brands and products.  The context in which brands and products are encountered impacts the interaction with and emotional experience of those brands and products.  I would say we have more to learn and offer our clients by keeping the nuances and specificities of emotions in the forefront than in their glossing over and backgrounding.

Conner:  In the words of Christopher Walken in a Saturday Night Live skit I saw once, “Wowie, wow, wow!”  This is fabulous information.  Thank you!

Patricia Sunderland, located in New York, is a partner of Practica Group LLC (practicagroup.com).  She can be contacted at psunderland@practicagroup.com.

In this feature Emotive® analytics seeks feedback from experts in areas related to emotional assessment.  The initial questions come from Paul Conner.  However, follow up questions can be submitted using the form below the article.

This installment of Ask the Emotional Expert features Paul Bolls, Associate Professor, Strategic Communication and Co-director of the PRIME Lab at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  The PRIME Lab is dedicated to studying consumers’ neurophysiological reactions to various forms of media.

Conner:  More and more we are learning that emotions drive humans’, and therefore consumers’, behavior.  What are your thoughts about that?

Bolls:  It’s not at all surprising that marketing researchers, particularly those working in the area of neuromarketing, are concluding that emotions are the fundamental driver of consumer attitudes, decision-making, and ultimate purchase behavior.  Neuropsychologists have discovered that human emotion, at its most basic level, consists of foundational “approach and avoidance” motivational processes. Activity within these motivational processes gets translated into specific emotions and feelings associated with products and brands. This overarching emotional process determines our more enduring attitudes towards brands which then in turn shape our decision-making and behavior towards specific brands of products. Marketers who do not grasp how critical emotional processes are in determining the degree to which consumers are willing to approach their product, and the role marketing communication plays in associating emotions with brands, are setting themselves up to lose ground to competitors that truly understand how to connect with and sell to the emotional brains of consumers.

Conner:  Tell me generally what you do in The PRIME Lab to study the issue of emotions driving consumer behavior?

Bolls:  In the PRIME Lab, which is housed within the Missouri School of Journalism, we focus on studying how different ways of producing an advertisement impacts emotional processing of the message. We primarily focus on understanding how very specific features of advertisements engage distinct emotional processes during real-time exposure to them. Basically, we study how brand messages can effectively evoke emotional processing that is likely to serve marketing objectives. We combine psychophysiological measures of emotional processing — heart rate, galvanic skin conductance, and facial EMG — with self-report measures of emotional experience, attitudes, memory, and behavioral intentions to fully understand how specific advertising executions are processed by targeted consumers.

Conner:  Can you share an example or two of studies you have conducted that have led to important insights for marketers?

Bolls: Recently, my colleagues and I have done some work examining features of health messages — specifically anti-tobacco messages. In doing this, we have studied the effectiveness of negative graphic images in TV advertisements that evoke strong aversive emotional activation. This research has provided insight into how emotionally aversive content in advertising can in some contexts, when executed appropriately, be extremely effective. The presence of disgusting visual images in anti-tobacco ads when combined with message copy focused on physical health threats resulting from tobacco use was found in our experiments to evoke strong defensive responses in viewers that can potentially decrease memory for the message. However, also including efficacy related copy that is intended to increase confidence in a smoker’s ability to stop smoking was found to dampen smokers’ defensive responses to negatively graphic messages, potentially making such messages more persuasive. It seems like the traditional school of thought in designing public health campaign messages has been to either completely steer clear of emotionally aversive messages or try to scare the daylights out of the target. Our research suggests clear strategies that reflect a more intelligent approach to the execution of negatively graphic health messages that unfortunately few public health campaigns have managed to adopt.

In the realm of radio advertising I have done some work studying how listening to radio ads produced to evoke visual mental imagery is an extremely engaging, emotional, personally relevant experience. High imagery radio ads engage visual cognition and have the potential to positively boost brand attitudes as well as purchase intentions. However, this potential is most realized when emotional images evoked by the radio ad are highly connected to the advertised product. A lot of radio advertising either completely fails to evoke emotional visual imagery or stumbles in associating evoked emotions with the advertised product. What is extremely exciting to me about this line of research is that it is applicable not only to traditional radio advertising, but to any form of audio advertising potentially delivered through podcasts, Internet radio, as well as other websites.

Conner:  What advice or direction would you give to marketers interested in employing some of these techniques?

Bolls:  I think marketers first and foremost need to fundamentally understand both the implicit and explicit emotional associations targeted consumers make with their product’s current design, packaging, as well as brand messaging. Armed with this understanding, marketers can then move towards figuring out how to elicit foundational patterns of appetitive and aversive emotional responses in targeted consumers that will promote a strong favorable emotional relationship between consumers and the brand, purchase behavior and brand loyalty.

Conner:  OK, here’s your chance!  Without getting too salesy, how would you plug your work at The PRIME Lab?  What might you be looking for from people who read this interview?

Bolls: As a research lab housed in a major university, the primary mission of the PRIME Lab is basic research into the design of emotionally powerful brand messages that are more likely to achieve marketing objectives. This is best accomplished through collaborations between academic researchers, like myself, professional marketers, and other marketing researchers. In the process of conducting our basic research we offer the opportunity for testing specific advertising executions. I thoroughly enjoy discussing how the emotional human mind processes brand messages and the implications of this for effective message design. So, if anything in this interview has piqued your interest, I would love to talk with you to discuss any questions as well as the possibility of conducting work in the PRIME Lab that meets specific research needs you might have.

Feel free to contact me at 573-884-0170 office, 573-673-5030 cell, or bollsp@missouri.edu.

Conner:  Thank you very much!

This article will be most revealing and valuable if you first know and/or believe the following about emotions:

1. Emotions, which are triggered by experiences and thoughts, ultimately inform and direct consumer decisions and behavior.
2. Emotions’ influence is difficult to assess because it is often hidden from view — either operating in the consumers’ unconscious or being guarded by consumers when asked directly about how they are feeling.
3. For this reason, effectively assessing emotions’ influence on consumer decisions and behavior needs special techniques — ones that get at emotions’ “implicit” or “hidden” nature.

These points have been firmly established in neuroscience, psychology, or marketing research in recent years.

(If you’ve read any of my previous articles, presentations, or reports, I apologize for starting this way because this information is redundant.  Blah, blah, blah, there he goes again, emotions, emotions, emotions.  Sorry, but it’s important!)

Accepting the need for special techniques to effectively assess emotions’ implicit influence, there are many to choose from. They include projectives and laddering, which are often used in traditional interviewing, along with less traditional interviewing techniques such as psychodrama, metaphor elicitation, neurolinguistic programming, and even the highly misunderstood hypnosis-interviewing.  They also include naturalistic observation techniques, commonly called ethnography.  These days neuromarketing is becoming very popular, so “hot” implicit emotional assessment techniques include psychophysiological emotion indicators such as fMRI, EEG, other biometrics, and facial coding & electromyography to name a few.

However, there is one family of implicit emotional assessment techniques that is not as well known or used in consumer research as the ones just mentioned.  But these techniques can be just as effective, if not more.  This family of techniques is commonly called Implicit Association or Misattribution.

These techniques come primarily from social and cognitive psychology and they are often used in those disciplines to expose hidden negative emotions or attitudes, like various forms of socially unacceptable biases.  Noted experts in this family of techniques are Anthony Greenwald (the inventor of the Implicit Association Test) and Russell Fazio (well-known for initiating implicit “priming” techniques). However, there are dozens of others.  (Send me a note at pconner@experiemotive.com and I will send other names.)

These techniques, which allow quantitative emotional scoring and graphing, work by first quickly (and sometimes subliminally) presenting representations of objects of interest (e.g., brands).  This “priming,” as it is commonly called, activates unconscious emotional associations respondents have with the targeted objects.  After this, respondents are misdirected to complete a feelings task that appears unrelated to the priming.  For instance, they might be asked to indicate whether or not a group of letters on the screen (some of which form actual feeling words) represent a real word or not.  Or they might be asked to rate how much an ambiguous image conveys a particular feeling.  Implicit emotions toward the targeted object are “measured” by observing the respondents’ performance on the misdirected task after being primed with the targeted object’s representation vs. being not primed at all or being primed with some sort of neutral control representation.

The graph below shows what can result from this type of an approach.  This is an Emotional Profile that we recently developed for a well-known consumer foods brand.

This graph neatly illustrates how those with higher shares of purchases for this brand felt about the brand explicitly (in red; within their awareness and willingness to share) and, most importantly, implicitly, too (in blue; outside of their awareness or willingness to share).  This provides information that would not have been possible using traditional explicit self-reports alone (which is most often used in market research).  Furthermore, additional analyses (e.g., multiple regressions) can confirm which of these emotions most drives purchase or brand preference.  In this study, implicit (not explicit) loving was the emotion that most drove share of purchases for this brand.  Again, this insight would not have been possible from traditional explicit self-report methods.

For more information on this type of technique, please visit our “Your Brand’s Emotional Profile” page and/or download our Samsung/Sony report.

So if you are interested in, or already believe in, the importance of emotions in consumer behavior, and if you are interested in an effective technique for revealing emotions that self-reports miss or misrepresent, consider Implicit Priming.

I hope this has been valuable.  As always, please submit your comments, contact me directly, or share this article with others (by using the e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn icons above).

Until next time…

Take a look at this image.

What do you see? You might be saying:

“This is a smiling car.”

Is this car really smiling?  I don’t think so.  People smile, and maybe animals, but not cars.  If you see a smiling car, you’re not crazy.  You’ve just “anthropomorphized” it.  This means that you’ve imagined it as a person.

(Because “anthropomorphize” is a long, hard to type, and hard to say word, I’ll abbreviate it as APM.)

It’s well-established that we APM products and brands.  Why do we do it?  Because we’re by nature social animals and APM’ing gives us a better “feel” for products and brands, which directs our buying decisions about them.  More academically, APM’ing is a natural social heuristic that helps us optimize our (consumer) lives.

(If you’re interested in learning more about what APM is and why we do it, I suggest searching for and reading works by Susan Fournier, Grainne Fitzsimons, Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz, and Pankaj Aggarwal to name a few.)

I’m particularly interested in APM because I’ve come to believe that we automatically APM almost everything we come into contact with — including products and brands — again, in order to more easily examine our feelings toward them and decide what to do with them.

Recently though, I’ve read many articles indicating that maybe APM is not as automatic as I had thought.  (Some of these articles, and more about APM, are highlighted in a recent EMA Facts newsletter that you can download for free at the newsletters page of this website — it’s #13.)

What I’ve learned so far from this reading has lead to the following points about how to optimize the benefits of APM marketing:

(To further understand these points, again, it will be helpful for you to download EMA Facts 13 from this website.)

I’m sure there’s much more to APM’ing, but these points represent some of the important things I’ve learned about optimizing APM marketing efforts.

These APM caveats or best practices have not completely shaken my belief that we automatically APM almost everything, including products and brands.  So I’ll continue to search for research to support my belief and will likely revisit the topic at a later date.  Stay tuned and return often!

And please submit your related comments and pass this along to others you think might be interested.

Until next time…

I’ve never met him, but I’d guess that Piotr Winkielman (pictured below) is a fascinating fellow.  I base this on research he does to show how much people’s behavior is guided by unconscious emotions.

In my favorite of his studies (Unconscious Affective Reactions to Masked Versus Angry Faces Influence Consumption Behavior and Judgments of Value, 2005), to regulate people’s moods unbeknownst to them, he (and his colleagues Kent Berridge and Julia Wilbarger) subliminally primed thirsty respondents with pictures of either happy faces or angry faces.  He then had them engage in a couple of “consumer” tasks — drinking a beverage and indicating how much they would pay for the beverage.  Between the priming and the beverage drinking/rating, respondents engaged in a seemingly unrelated task — explicitly rating how they felt after seeing a series of emotionally neutral faces.

The results were amazing, I think.  The thirsty respondents who were subliminally primed with happy faces drank more of the beverage and said they would pay more for it than the thirsty respondents who were subliminally primed with angry faces.  In addition, both groups of respondents explicitly rated their feelings the same.  Furthermore, the invisibility of the happy vs. sad prime was confirmed — people were not consciously aware of it.

Why is this important? Besides showing that our behavior can be influenced by our emotional state (no big revelation) unconsciously (a bigger revelation), it speaks indirectly to potential misgivings in direct emotional self-report research.  Specifically, it warns us not to fully trust what people say when we ask them how they are or were feeling about something or why they would do or did something.  Aside from sometimes deliberate attempts to look good to the reseacher or others that might be in a (focus) group discussion, people often don’t know how they are feeling at present or did feel in the past, which speaks to what drives or drove a certain behavior.

If you need more proof, search for and read the works of Dan Ariely, Gerald Clore, or Elizabeth Cowley, just to name a few of many researchers who have found that we are not always in touch later with how we felt (and what caused our behavior) in the past.

In what I think is a classic piece of work (Belief and Feeling: Evidence for an Accessibility Model of Emotional Self-Report, Psychological Bulletin, 2002), Michael Robinson and Gerald Clore point out that self-reports of past emotional experiences can inherently only be estimates of emotional truths.  Instead they are one or more of a variety of reconstructions which include episodic memory, situation-specific beliefs, or identity-specific beliefs.  The point is that when we ask someone “how did you feel about…,” their answer cannot be an “online emotion” (i.e., the emotion associated with the actual experience).  It must be an estimated (and therefore, flawed) reconstruction of it in our memory.

In her article “Remembering an Affective Reaction to a Previous Consumption Experience” (Journal of Consumer Research, 2007), Elizabeth Cowley shows how inaccurate respondents’ emotional memories can be when asked how they felt when engaged in an activity only about 30 minutes prior to being asked.

In work I am currently conducting, I’m seeing that certain implicit feelings (i.e., those measured by indirect non-self report means) are more predictive of past purchases of a certain brand of food product than any of the explicit feelings the respondents said they have toward the brand.

So the next time you think about conducting emotional consumer research that explores how people say they are feeling or did feel, strongly consider supplementing their direct self-report with techniques that, at least to some degree, circumvent changed memories, subconsciously filtered defenses, or, in some cases, consciously deliberate efforts to “put on a good face.”  Techniques can include unobtrusive observation (commonly called ethnography), projective techniques, psychodrama, hypnosis-interviewing, misattribution, or psychophysiological techniques to name a few.  Yes, it will likely cost a little more.  But more effectively surfacing the truth, or truths that you were not aware of, may well be worth a little extra cost.