11.11.2022 - by AXEL ECKSTEIN

It was initially a marginal phenomenon, but it has long sought the limelight and has received a major boost in recent years: the word emotional.

We hear it regularly — whether in statements by footballers, politicians or marketing and advertising people.

However, emotional is probably also the word that is least clear as to what exactly it means.

So what are emotions? Leading emotion researchers asked each other for their definition and could not find much agreement. One of them put the dilemma in a nutshell:

“Everyone knows what an emotion is until asked to give a definition.”

Worse still, the number of definitions in the research literature alone has quintupled in the last 40 years.

In addition, emotions are usually viewed differently in serious science than in marketing, because there it is not so much the truth that is sought, but rather a market for consulting services.

The research subject of emotions defies direct access. And a broad consensus.

Nevertheless, we now have a level of knowledge that comes quite close to the actual nature of emotions.

Leading neurologists have built a new empirical basis. And confirmed what Darwin already recognised: emotions are essential for survival.

Emotions are transient.

Emotion comes from the Latin emovere : to move out.

Etymologically, but also neurophysiologically, emotions have more to do with changes than with states. Move out of a situation you shouldn’t stay in. That is the real message of our emotions.

States of arousal are not designed to last. If the stimulus remains the same, the emotional reaction weakens; sometimes it disappears completely.

The principle can already be found at the cellular level, at our synapses. After a transmitter action, the ions there need a longer period of time to get back into position.

Evolution, as always highly efficient, is thus pursuing a “cost reduction”. This is because where a signal has already been received, resources for perception can be temporarily reduced. In favour of other cells on alert.

So more input does not mean more emotion. After a certain time, many emotions transition into a mood continuum that includes more cognitive components.

This effect can also be observed on a very large scale. In developing countries, personally perceived happiness increases rapidly with per capita income. Even at the typical sums for emerging countries, the curve flattens out and tends to move sideways from then on. Switzerland is five times as rich as Colombia, but only just under one per cent happier.

No one put it better than Sigmund Freud: “The intention that man should be happy is not provided for in the plan of creation.”

Stronger stimuli do not lead to stronger emotions, nor is it their purpose to make our lives richer, more interesting and more beautiful. Rather, emotions function like a control loop and are a fundamental principle for sustaining life. A feedback system in the brain that analyses where we stand in relation to our goals.

First problem solving, then gaining pleasure.

If emotions serve the dynamic adaptation to a normal state and if dangerous situations were the rule and not the exception for long stretches of our evolutionary history, then it is no wonder that we have a “negative brain”.

Our negativity bias has been empirically proven, not least by the groundbreaking experiments of psychologist Daniel Kahnemann: “We hate losses much more than we love gains.”

Negative or, to put it more neutrally, aversive emotions always take precedence. They block out everything that is not immediately recognisable as a solution to a problem. And the more serious the problem, the stronger the selective perception. Only when it has been solved are we open to what is fun.

The fact that, as in Italian, emozioni can also mean joyful excitement and passion is likeable, but misleading if you want to understand emotions from the ground up.

Emotions make you freer.

Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of emotions is the gain in flexibility they offer. In fact, they have more to do with freedom than with compulsion.

Emotions are an intelligent interface that mediates between input and output. By decoupling stimulus and response, they provide our behaviour with greater adaptability.

The common perception of emotions as a powerful dictator that imposes typical reaction patterns on people is not true. Rather, emotions are the collaborator in the regime. They help us to vary our behaviour in such a way that it serves our personal goals.

Feeling accelerates thinking.

The classic hemisphere model, which assigns different exclusive tasks to the left and right hemispheres of the brain, is considered outdated.

The division into a fast, automatic and a slow, strenuous system is now more in line with scientific criteria and can even be tested.

In the so-called Stroop test, coloured words have to be read out, which, treacherously, are not coloured with the same colour as the word they refer to. If you try it, you can immediately feel how the two thought systems come into conflict with each other.

Some neuronal processes are three times faster than others. The former is what we would colloquially call “feeling” and the latter corresponds more to our impression of “thinking”.

Even before we think, before we consciously believe we are making them, our limbic system has already anticipated the majority of our decisions.

Emotions are simple, efficient evaluation codes for characteristic situations that apply in most cases (not all!).

Everything is emotional.

The idea of a rational and an emotional brain hemisphere must also be buried with the hemisphere model. The opposite of emotional is not rational, but unemotional. And that doesn’t actually exist in the brain.

“There is no consciousness without emotion” says the renowned brain researcher Gerhard Roth.

Can we imagine anything more emotional than the rational statement “I have a six in the lottery”?

Even radically functional things like the Google search slot provoke an incessant rush of emotional judgements. From admiration of the underlying business model to frustration at having clicked on the wrong thing again.

And when mathematicians, the epitome of rational people, describe the beauty, even spiritual dimension of their work, tears well up in their eyes.

Thinking never happens completely independently of feeling. On the contrary: emotions guide every process of perception, evaluation and decision-making, no matter how rational it may seem.

Emotions evaluate emotions.

Primary emotions can be moulded by secondary emotions. This can even reverse judgements.

Joy is considered “positive”. Schadenfreude, malicious delight is also joy, but we evaluate it very differently. And if we don’t, then only as long as we don’t become its target ourselves.

Something that some consider to be the universal language of emotions demonstrates context dependency and value subjectivity in the most extreme way: music. Researchers have found that the presumed common ground for musically generated goosebumps does not exist. Some get them from hip hop, others from Monteverdi. What we feel when listening to music depends entirely on our individual listening biography.

There can be no such thing as absolutely positive or absolutely negative emotions. Let’s call them more correctly appetitive and aversive emotions. In short: seeking pleasure, avoiding pain. Both forms are part of a complex interplay and are fundamentally “positive”. In the sense that they help us to reach an optimal state.

How to read minds.

Since its beginnings 20 years ago, neuromarketing has firmly established itself as a service for companies. It is essentially based on two assumptions that are not fundamentally wrong: that emotions play an important role in decision-making and that such processes contain predominantly unconscious, implicit elements.

The difficulties arise when trying to interpret neural processes beyond doubt and derive instructions for optimising marketing measures.

This does not prevent resourceful entrepreneurs from using measurement methods from medical diagnostics to make money from emotions. First of all with their clients’ fear of not being successful.

Emotions are made up of several components, but usually only one is measured. And if several are measured, there are hardly any correlations.

For example, attempts to harmonise the classification of facial expressions using automatic image recognition with the activity of a facial muscle measured by EMG, which is important for emotional expression, have failed.

Sometimes we smile not out of joy, but out of shame, politeness or resentment. Context is needed to make reliable judgements about facial expressions.

Neuroimaging shows brain activity, but never thought content, let alone emotions. Brain activity is often so widely distributed that it cannot be assigned to an area with a known function. And these patterns are different in every person, even after identical stimuli.

The neuroscientist John Cacioppo expressed himself academically and yet spoke plainly when he said that “the categorical error” is the assumption that “cognitive phenomena can be clearly assigned to neural substrates”.

However, some neuromarketers suggest exactly that. Moreover, that emotions can be switched on and off from the outside in a reasonably targeted manner. Provided, of course, that you first know their “secret code”, which ultimately makes you the master of the consumer’s will.

This desire brings back the reactionary image of human beings as stimulus-response machines.

This is contradicted by the modern realisation that emotions are a reflection of our freedom and individuality.

Important emotion researchers such as Lisa Feldman Barrett and Ute Frevert emphasise the control we have over our feelings. Emotions are biologically and genetically available to us and we influence whether and how we activate them.

Why emo tests miss the point.

Terms such as neuro-, limbic- or emotional marketing are used to market test procedures for advertising films, among other things.

The self-imposed rule of bypassing the test subjects’ consciousness is rarely adhered to for cost reasons. Instead of looking into their brains, they look at their fingers, which click on a scale of values using a computer mouse.

The testing institutes provide a limited selection of emotions and follow the old discrete models of the 1970s.

Apart from the methodological question marks, the main problem is a kind of positive dogma. Feelings such as fear, sadness and rejection are labelled “negative” a priori. At the same time, they are also considered detrimental to commercial success.

But it was precisely these feelings that made EDEKA’s Christmas film “Coming home” a viral hit with several million views. And it did so without stopping the unchecked sales growth that the company has enjoyed since it started focussing on creative advertising.

The other fatal pitfall in the use of emotional impact tests can be called the graph optimisation dogma.

A market research company analysed a commercial in which the father of a teenage boy is portrayed as intrusive and embarrassing, but ultimately endearing. Sometimes the son just needs a little more space for himself: in the new family van.

The market research company recommended — how could it be otherwise — cutting out the “embarrassing” scenes. However, instead of complex emotions, their test recorded simple scene liking.

Second-by-second tracking does not provide the promised “real picture of emotions during their creation”, but rather blinds us to the actual story and brand-relevant secondary emotions.

The constitutive emotion of the film is the experience that you can find another person embarrassing and still love them. Many people are familiar with this ambivalence from their own lives and it is precisely this that the director has to bring out with all the means of art. The reward: the secondary emotion “the brand understands me”.

The microscopic view that the usual test designs force us to take ignores the hierarchical structure of emotions in stories. What is “embarrassing” (father) at the scenic level becomes “funny” at the story level, “spacious” (room for oneself in the car) at the product level and finally “human” and “close” at the brand level.

It is wrong to negate the interconnectedness and dynamics of emotions. It would simply be against our nature if emotions were to move at a constant level — let alone the highest possible level.

Why there is nothing to tell without contrasts.

The most successful Hollywood films and video games are based on the principles that Aristotle wrote down in his Poetics 2300 years ago.

For the mother of all stories, tragedy, Aristotle defined: pity for the hero plus fear of a similar fate equals oikeia hedone, the characteristic pleasure for the viewer.

Or in the words of John Grisham: “You take a likeable person and put them in a terrible situation. You have to put them in a situation where they could die. There’s a lot of compassion to be maintained.”

Once again, Shakespeare leads the field. Every conceivable kind of death occurs in his plays. And, as usual with Shakespeare, never gratuitously, but always as an integral part of the plot and the idea of the play. Shakespeare is the most translated, staged, filmed and analysed author in world literature. In short: the most popular.

The “hero's journey” promises us that even the greatest problems can be overcome, and we passionately adhere to this belief due to our perpetual insecurity.

Although these and other “eternal” narrative forms are also standard in modern popular culture, it has taken a surprisingly long time for them to find their way into marketing communication. But we are seeing them there more and more. At the Cannes Lions, there are now jury categories such as “Social Film Series” or “Live Experience Games” and digital content is not only short and informative, but also long and epic.

In this context, it hardly seems contemporary to blame “limbic contradictions” for “bad advertising”, as one neuro-consultant does. Apart from the fact that it has always been wrong to regard the clash of opposites in stories as a problem. Motif exclusivity helps with positioning, not with storytelling.

Why the absence of problems means nothing.

The oncology department of a Swiss hospital wanted to change its claim “Together against cancer” because it was predominantly “negative” due to the words “against” and “cancer”. One of the new suggestions: “We for you”.

This example shows that the positive dogma can obscure market offers beyond recognition.

“So that everyone arrives safely” may be positive, but would not be a real substitute for the perhaps harsh but clear “Stop” on a road sign.

Messages with a high semantic content help us to navigate safely through the jungle of commandments, prohibitions — but also offers.

The varieties of the good life are vast, but nowhere near as vast as the possibilities of being prevented from living the good life. As an end goal, happiness and contentment is not relevant information, it’s about how you get there.

Let us remember the famous first sentence from Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

In order to avoid the daily impositions, information about things we don’t want is of the utmost importance to us at many times: without flavour enhancers, without child labour, without emissions. And that’s a good thing.

Why detours help to trigger emotions.

When trying to make emotions a topic, people typically fall into a kind of happy-go-lucky frenzy — especially in advertising images. They grimace and jump, giggle and shout.

But expressiveness is not the same as emotionality.

It is not an image in and of itself that has to be emotional here and now, but rather the idea it supports of what it would be like to use the brand yourself.

The basic method for increasing emotional impact originally comes from the realm of language, from rhetoric: A figurative expression (verbum translatum) is, strangely enough, often more emotional than the literal expression (verbum proprium).

Compare the actual expression “he is very slow” with the improper, but more effective “you can put soles on his shoes when he walks”.

After the method had become commonplace in language over thousands of years, its systematic application to images only began in the days of “Mad Men”. This was also the time when Roland Barthes’ “The rhetoric of the image” and “The visual codes” by Umberto Eco were published.

In modern advertising, the coding of messages is standard. Either the problem or the solution is dramatised. By symbol, analogy, exaggeration or as a basic sequence scheme.

Coding has three major advantages. Dispensing with images that belong to everyone brings more differentiation. Not addressing sensitive topics or taboos directly promotes acceptance. And decoding — especially if it is done neither too quickly nor too slowly — activates our reward system.

Emotions are not characteristics that the things around us actually have. Emotions are born in our heads. And change, disruption and contrasts are their elixir of life.

No one — least of all a brand — can force emotions, but only create spaces in which they can arise.