Chapter 6

The Central Role of Emotions in Consumer Responses

In This Chapter

Seeing why nonconscious emotions are central to consumer responses

Understanding how nonconscious emotions differ from conscious feelings

Appreciating the subtle ways emotions impact our bodies, and vice versa

Explaining how emotions influence attention and memory

In 1994, Antonio Damasio, a physician and neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, published a book that changed the way brain scientists thought about rationality and emotion. In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Penguin), Damasio showed that emotions, far from being the enemy of rationality, were essential to good decision making. Patients with damage to emotional centers in their brains were not cool and calm deciders like the hyper-rational Mr. Spock (see Chapter 2). Instead, they were barely able to make decisions at all! Damasio made the profound connection that emotions are not just compatible with good decisions; they’re indispensible contributors.

In this chapter, we explore the new view of emotions that has emerged in the brain sciences since Damasio’s discovery. We explain why it’s central to understanding consumer behavior and show how emotions interact with both attention and memory to influence consumer responses to marketing and products.

Understanding Nonconscious Emotional “Markers”

Damasio uses the term somatic markers to describe how emotions impact perceptions, evaluations, decisions, and behavior. Somatic markers are essentially memories of bodily responses to past experiences.

According to Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, these emotional markers are created and updated for every experience a person has in his or her life. When we confront a new situation, these markers are rapidly accessed, often nonconsciously, and provide an emotional guide for what to do next. If we’re conscious of this effect at all, we experience it as a slightly pleasant or unpleasant sensation associated with different options.

Deprived of these emotional signals, Damasio’s patients engaged in long and meandering cost-benefit analyses of options and consequences, from which they never seemed able to come to a final conclusion. Even choosing between two brands of cereal proved to be an excruciating and inconclusive process.

For the rest of us, the benefits of relying on emotional markers are clear. Emotional markers greatly simplify our ability to interact successfully with the world around us. Even though we may not be aware of the degree of attraction or aversion that we may have “marked” for a given object or situation, those markers provide us with a nonconscious shortcut to a quick and acceptable response, cutting through the potentially infinite expanse of pros and cons that may be relevant. We’re instinctively drawn in or repulsed by the emotional markers our past experience has assigned to each outcome. Because of this, and unlike Damasio’s unlucky patients, we can decide quickly and easily.

The survival value of this system is clear. Emotional markers allow us to react instinctively to changes in our environment. These reactions happen automatically, instantly, and without conscious thought. Imagine early humans encountering some dangerous predator. Those who could react instantly and run away survived. Those who had to stop and think about what to do became predator lunch.

In the modern world, humans apply this mechanism to product preferences, consumer decision making, and behavior. Consumers short on time, bombarded by information, and faced with barely distinguishable product alternatives rely on easily accessible emotional reactions to make shopping decisions. Because these reactions are not directly related to remembered product attributes or marketing messages, they operate outside the set of variables usually measured by traditional market research — explicit awareness, need, recall, and persuasion.

Unlike traditional market researchers, neuromarketers place these elusive nonconscious emotions at the center of their understanding of consumer behavior and have developed a toolkit of methods to measure them.

Nonconscious emotions versus conscious feelings

The term emotion actually encompasses a wide variety of mental states. The first important distinction is the difference between conscious emotions (commonly called feelings) and nonconscious emotions (called by scientists affect, or affective states). We’re all aware of feelings. We know when we feel sad, happy, joyful, angry, or depressed. Feelings can often be attributed to a specific object or situation (meeting a well-liked friend, standing in a long line at the bank), but sometimes they can be more generalized moods — emotional states that don’t have an obvious source.

Somatic markers, as described in the previous section, are nonconscious affective states. We generally aren’t aware of them and don’t have access to how they influence our perceptions, choices, or behaviors.

Brain scientists believe nonconscious and conscious emotions operate together to draw our attention to beneficial opportunities in our environment, alert us to dangers, and remind us to learn from our experiences. One prominent theory, proposed by Roy Baumeister and colleagues in 2009, holds that emotions shape behavior indirectly rather than directly through the following:

Learning: Conscious emotions usually appear after, rather than before, emotional episodes, when they can best promote learning and establish or reinforce nonconscious emotional associations.

Anticipation: Automatically activated nonconscious emotions can immediately trigger approach or avoidance behaviors or, more often, influence judgments, goals, choices, and actions through nonconscious means.

Reflection: Once internalized in memory, acquired knowledge of emotional experiences can serve as input for selecting actions and strategies to achieve (or avoid) emotional outcomes in the future.

There is a natural feedback in this system at both the conscious and nonconscious levels. Consciously, what we learn from emotional episodes gets applied to future similar episodes, which then provide an opportunity for further learning. Nonconsciously, our emotional markers are updated by every encounter we have with people and objects in our world.

This way of thinking about emotions gives us a framework for understanding the role of emotions in consumer responses. When we’re thrilled by the experience of driving in a fast sports car, we learn from that conscious emotional experience. This becomes a direct input into our later conscious feelings, brand preferences, choices, and behaviors in that product category.

In addition, that experience updates our nonconscious emotional markers, which impacts mental processes we aren’t aware of, like the extent to which we notice information about that car in the future, the type and amount of information we commit to memory, and even the goals and motivations we form with regard to driving and purchasing automobiles.

Emotions are also classified as either discrete or as points along underlying dimensions of emotion. The discrete emotions approach contends that each emotion (such as anger, joy, or disgust) has a unique profile in experience, physical presentation, and behavior. According to the dimensional perspective, all emotions can be classified along a small number of fundamental dimensions. As introduced in Chapter 5, the most commonly measured dimensions are

Arousal: Activation, stimulation, excitement

Valence: Liking, disliking

Motivation: Action orientation, approach-avoidance predisposition

Although the issue hasn’t been resolved conclusively, current evidence tends to support the dimensional view of emotion. Dimensional frameworks have been shown to work well for classifying emotional states and predicting their impact on behavior. Most neuromarketing tools that measure emotions use brain or body measures to rank emotional responses along one or more of these three dimensions (see Chapter 16).

I feel your pain: Emotions and body states

Another important aspect of emotions is that they’re closely related to body states. This works in both directions: Changes in our bodies produce changes in emotions, and changes in emotions produce changes in our bodies. This connection has obvious implications for marketing and provides a foundation for interesting research directions in neuromarketing.

Many findings in social psychology illustrate that changes in body states such as movement and facial expressions can lead to changes in emotions. Here are some examples from research in this field, called embodied cognition:

People instructed to nod their heads (as in agreement) while listening to persuasive messages felt more positively toward the message than people instructed to shake their heads (as in disagreement).

People who looked at Chinese symbols while pulling a lever toward them (an approach movement) later liked those symbols more than people who looked at the same symbols while pushing the lever away from them (an avoidance movement).

People asked to hold pens in their mouths in a way that forced a smile-like expression were more amused by cartoons than people who were forced to hold pens in their mouths in a way that forced a frown-like expression.

People who held hot coffee mugs in their hands were more likely to rate a fictitious person as warm and friendly than people who held iced coffee.

People who read résumés attached to heavy clipboards were more likely to rate candidates as more qualified than when the résumés were attached to lighter clipboards.

Emotions and body states are also deeply interconnected in human social perceptions and communication. One mechanism by which emotions are communicated and internalized in social interactions is through mimicry and imitation. Research has shown that mimicry of emotional gestures is an important element in empathy (the ability to infer the emotional states of others). Close study of facial expressions reveals that we’re better at interpreting emotions in others when we mimic the other people’s expressions on our own faces. For the most part, we aren’t aware that we’re doing this, because the mimicry happens outside conscious awareness.

Recent neuroimaging studies have confirmed that this process of understanding emotions in others by simulating them in ourselves is accomplished by activating the same brain areas during observation that are activated when the emotions are induced directly. In other words, we literally feel another person’s pain by activating the pain processing centers of our own brains, even though we aren’t actually feeling pain at that moment.

There is a broader lesson here: In addition to being a great prediction machine (as described in Chapter 5), the brain is also an excellent simulation machine. Our brains use simulation (mentally picturing a situation and then imagining how we would act in that situation) not just for understanding emotions in others, but also for understanding and anticipating all kinds of current and future situations.

The idea that body states can change emotions is a little counterintuitive for most people, but we’re all familiar with the ability of emotions to change body states. Who hasn’t experienced “butterflies in the stomach” before a public presentation or “jumped out of a seat” while watching a scary movie?

At a deeper level, emotional states, even nonconscious ones, trigger a wide variety of body-state changes. These changes are often measured to infer the presence of emotions in neuromarketing research. For example:

Arousal is associated with increases in perspiration production, heart rate, and pupil size.

Valence is associated with small (often unobservable) changes in facial muscles such as the frown muscle (corrugator supercilii in scientific terms), which contracts during negative valence and relaxes during positive valence.

Approach and avoidance reactions are often accompanied by literal approach or avoidance body movements, such as leaning forward or backward, or turning toward or away from the object of emotion.

What emotions are good for

Emotions happen to us. They are not something we can prevent, and they can be extremely difficult to control. So, why have they survived as cognitive processes so distinctly a part of the human condition?

The most likely explanation is that emotions exist because they fill two important survival needs:

They alert us to situations with positive or negative outcome potentials, without requiring us to actually experience those outcomes.

They force us to learn, because conscious emotional experiences, both positive and negative, are so important to our lives that we’re highly motivated to anticipate them and either seek or avoid them.

According to Baumeister and colleagues, the purpose of conscious emotions is to command attention and stimulate learning. The purpose of automatic affective reactions (emotional markers), in contrast, is to provide direct input into immediate behavioral situations, often doing so well before conscious processing can even size up the situation and propose a conscious plan of action. Together, conscious and nonconscious emotions combine to keep us safe, satisfied, and effectively pursuing life-supporting goals.

Emotions are intimately tied to consumer behavior, because so much of what triggers our emotions is related to the things we buy, the things we want, and the things we want to avoid. Liking (positive emotional valence) is enhanced by mechanisms such as familiarity and processing fluency. Experiencing emotional responses to products and brands stimulates and reinforces learning, which can then shape our responses to future experiences with those products and brands, creating habits and preferences that can last a lifetime.

Emotions also have an important signaling function. Because we can empathize with our fellow humans, we’re very good at reading emotions in others. This helps us with social action, cooperation, and conflict management. In a consumer context, we see what products friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers like and don’t like, and this contributes to our own learning about those products. Learning from watching the emotional reactions of others is much more efficient and convenient than having to experience all those emotions ourselves. The rise of modern media has vastly expanded the potential for learning by observing others. But it also has created a buzzing confusion of mixed messages that complicates our choices and taxes our cognitive-miser minds.

Finally, emotions provide an efficient shortcut to consumer decision making. Emotions trigger goals and activate approach or avoidance systems that guide and simplify our choices as consumers, often performing these functions completely outside our conscious awareness. To the extent that these shortcuts make evaluations and choices easier and faster, they allow consumers to bypass the route to purchase traditionally measured by market research — from attention, persuasion, and memorization to recall at the point of purchase. Instead, these shortcuts take advantage of the mental “express lane” to consumer choice that neuromarketing specializes in measuring — from vague sense of liking directly to the checkout counter.

Emotions and Attention

We’ve called attention, emotion, and memory the three master variables of neuromarketing research (see Chapter 5). Of these three, emotion is most often in the driver’s seat, in that it naturally enhances both attention and memory. In this section, we describe the relationship between emotion and attention and discuss its significance for understanding consumer responses.

Aiming the spotlight of attention with emotional markers

Emotion is not the only source of attention, but it is a reliable one. In a visual field of many objects, the one that is most emotionally relevant is likely to pull our attention toward it. This is an example of bottom-up attention, an involuntary shift in focus, as compared to top-down attention, in which we voluntarily choose to direct our attention to a particular object. It’s the difference between searching for your favorite brand of milk in the grocery store cooler, and having your attention drawn to a milk carton that has a distinct new shape you’ve never seen before. In either case, focusing attention represents a transition from nonconscious to conscious processing. It isn’t possible to pay attention without being aware that you’re paying attention.

Emotional markers can trigger attention toward one object at the expense of other, less emotionally relevant objects. Because emotions are closely tied to motivations, nonconscious emotional reactions can often direct us toward aspects of our environment that can help us achieve our goals. This opens up the possibility of analysis and learning. Conversely, objects or information sources that fail to generate an emotional reaction are more likely to be ignored and forgotten.

Of the three dimensions of emotion, emotional valence tends to draw our attention to the familiar and the easy to process. A sense of familiarity, in turn, can be derived from actual or imagined experience. Research shows that our brains respond quite similarly to things that are truly familiar and things that are mistaken to be familiar. There’s a kind of feedback loop here: Familiarity induces liking, liking draws attention, and attention increases the sense of familiarity. In this way, we become more and more comfortable with a subset of things in our world that satisfy our needs, even though there may be many other alternatives that do the job just as well.

Emotional arousal has an interesting relationship to attention. Like increasing valence, increasing arousal attracts attention, but it also narrows attention. As we become more emotionally aroused, we become better at filtering out distractions and focusing more intently on a specific object of attention. This only works up to a point, however. If arousal gets too high, attention begins to deteriorate and focus becomes more difficult. When people are under stress (a common form of arousal), for example, their ability to handle distractions declines. The universal lament of the harried parent — “Leave me alone, I need to concentrate!” — is a perfect example of this effect in action.

Although emotions reliably trigger conscious attention, it does not follow that emotion is the only source of attention. As described in Chapter 5, novelty or expectancy violation (a mental reaction that occurs when you observe something your brain didn’t anticipate) is another common source of attention. Novelty draws attention even if it’s emotionally neutral. If it’s associated with emotion, it’s often associated with negative emotion, because humans take a naturally vigilant attitude toward things that are new and different. Because the properties and effects of a novel item or situation are unknown, we tend to approach it with some degree of caution, which translates into negative emotional valence, at least until the item or situation becomes more familiar.

Seeing why attention sometimes isn’t so good for marketers

A major marketing area where emotion and attention intersect is advertising. Here, research has tended to go down two somewhat contradictory paths. One approach to traditional ad testing emphasizes the value of attention as an element of advertising effectiveness. The more people pay attention to an ad, the more likely they are to remember it, and the more effective it’s considered to be. This is often called the high attention processing model of advertising effectiveness. It’s closely associated with the rational consumer model we describe in Chapter 2.

A second approach argues that attention is actually bad for advertising in some circumstances (such as TV ads) and for some purposes (such as brand-building), because the more people pay attention to an ad, the more likely they are to create mental counterarguments to the persuasive messaging in the ad and, therefore, develop resistance to the message.

According to this view, successful ads work not because they grab attention and persuade logically, but because they generate positive emotional responses that get associated with the brand or product through simple repetition. High attention to the advertising itself doesn’t help this process and may actually interfere with it. So, low attention, combined with positive emotional associations, is seen as preferable. This is called the low attention processing model of advertising effectiveness.

Advertising researchers have been arguing about this question for years. Neuromarketing measures can help resolve this debate. There is a fair amount of evidence that people do implicitly resist persuasive messages (discussed in Chapter 5). In addition, the high attention processing model doesn’t tap into nonconscious ways in which an ad might influence brand attitudes and buying behavior, because it’s based on measuring conscious, self-reported responses using traditional research methods like interviews and surveys. So, we know it’s based on an incomplete picture of relevant brain processes.

Findings from modern brain science about nonconscious processes like priming, familiarity, processing fluency, and emotional markers do provide a rich source of new models for testing these two approaches. Given the centrality of both conscious and nonconscious emotions in consumer responses, it seems likely that high positive emotion, rather than either high or low attention, will be found to be the key to advertising effectiveness.

Emotions and Memory

Many studies have confirmed that emotionally charged events are better remembered than neutral events, especially if the emotion triggered by the event matches the emotional state of the observer at the moment. Both negative and positive emotions appear to enhance memory. This effect has been observed even among people who normally have memory deficiencies, such as Alzheimer’s patients.

Emotions make memories memorable

Emotions not only improve memory, but also focus memory. Brain scientists believe both these effects are related to the roles played by emotion as an alerting and learning mechanism.

Supporting this view, studies of the details of learning from emotional episodes show that memories are enhanced only for information that is related to the cause of the emotional episode, but not for unrelated peripheral information. In one study, people were shown an image of a woman bicyclist lying on the ground, bleeding from a head injury. People were better able to remember details about the woman, such as the color of her coat, than they were able to remember extraneous details, such as the color of a nearby car. This result makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Enhanced memory for information relevant to the emotional core of an episode is more likely to be helpful than peripheral information, if a similar situation occurs later on.

Most people are familiar with the idea of flashbulb memories. These are memories of a particularly emotional event (such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the Challenger explosion) that feel burned into our brains with photographic accuracy. These are almost always negative emotional events, accompanied by a high degree of surprise or shock.

Forward-thinking scientists have recorded people’s accounts of their activities and feelings in the immediate aftermath of such events. Then, after a lapse of one year, three years, or even ten years, they’ve interviewed those people again and recorded their recollections. The results are surprisingly consistent. Although people have unshakable certainty about the accuracy of their memories of these events, in most instances, those memories are incorrect. For all kinds of details — where they were, who they were with, what they did, when they did it — their memories deviate significantly from their original accounts. What’s interesting about these results isn’t so much that the memories are flawed, but that people are so certain that those flawed memories are correct.

This highlights an extremely important feature of human memory — one that applies even to vividly recalled memories that are deeply imbued with emotional content. Memories are constantly changing, and even the act of remembering changes the content of our memories.

How we remember memories

Psychologists at two New York universities performed an intriguing study to better understand why memories of events like 9/11 tend to diverge over time. First, they had a group of participants record their memories of events on that day. Then, each participant was matched up with another participant who had similar experiences, and each pair discussed their memories of 9/11. The researchers found that when one of the participants discussed a particular detail of his or her day, both participants would be better able to recall that detail later on. But if a detail was not discussed, it became harder to remember. In particular, memories that were closely related to the ones mentioned in the conversation became the most difficult for both the speaker and the listener to access. Over time, those memories were more likely to be forgotten.

What seemed to be occurring was a kind of collective forgetting based on an experience of shared remembering. In other words, the act of discussing a memory — even a vivid one like where you were and what you were doing on 9/11 — can have the effect of changing that memory, making some details more accessible and other details less accessible. If the memory is discussed many times with many people, the overall effect may be the replacement of the original memory with a kind of shared but distorted memory.

This experiment illustrates a more general, and generally misunderstood, characteristic of human memory: Our memories are continually constructed and reconstructed; they’re never saved intact. Many people’s common-sense view of memory is that it operates like a kitchen cabinet. Memories are like dinner plates that are stored in the cabinet. Later on, when we want to retrieve them, we open the cabinet and grab the plates. Of course, we imagine them to be the same plates, because the cabinet is just a passive container.

But human memory doesn’t work like this “memory cabinet.” A better (and more modern) analogy is offered by Leonard Mlodinow in his book Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (Pantheon): Memories are like photos stored on a computer hard disk. Because raw images take up too much space, they aren’t stored verbatim. Instead, algorithms are used to save them in a highly compressed format that includes only certain key aspects of the original image. When they’re retrieved, they’re slightly different from what was stored.

Even this analogy breaks down for human memory, though, because we scramble our memories even more. Every time we remember a memory, the memory we retrieve is partial and incomplete, and our nonconscious fills in the missing pieces with plausible substitutes, which then get mixed in with the original memory. The result is a constantly changing impression of what we think we did. Ironically, the best way to keep a memory intact is to never remember it!

The fallibility of human memory is well documented. For example, in the legal realm, mistaken eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions, as later determined by DNA-based reversals. In psychology labs, scientists have successfully induced almost any kind of false memory in their unsuspecting experimental subjects, including convincing 62 percent of participants in one study that they had shaken hands with Bugs Bunny when they visited Disneyland as a child (which is impossible, because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character, not a Disney character, so Bugs isn’t at Disneyland).

As summarized by Mlodinow, human memory research has reached three major conclusions:

People have a good memory for the general gist of events but a bad one for the details.

When pressed for the unremembered details, even well-intentioned people making a sincere effort to be accurate will inadvertently fill in the gaps by making things up.

People will believe the memories they make up.

These findings have clear implications for both traditional market researchers and neuromarketers. Relying on consumer self-reports to tell you what people have done in the past is a highly risky technique. Even using sophisticated nonverbal neuromarketing techniques, it’s important to remind yourself that a measure of memory activation (such as a brain-wave measure) is simply an indication that memory processes are taking place in the brain. It tells you nothing about the content of that memory, including whether it accurately captures the object or situation remembered.

Memory and emotional markers

Emotional markers enhance memory activation. The stronger the emotional reaction, the stronger the memory. But what is remembered is not a perfect recording of the experience. It’s a highly selective memory that leaves out many details. These details are seamlessly filled in later by the nonconscious when the memory is recalled. We’re very poor at separating what was part of the original memory from what was added at recall time, so our conscious awareness of our past is partial and distorted.

This would be a crazy way to build a memory system if the purpose of the system were to remember the past perfectly, like a flawless human video recorder. But this isn’t the purpose, which leads us to our most important point about memory: Human memory didn’t evolve for perfect remembering; it evolved for acting and surviving in an uncertain world. Survival necessarily depends on being able to tell the difference between what’s important and what isn’t. It doesn’t depend on remembering everything. So, our brains operate on the basis of a trade-off: Emotion-enhanced memory provides a very good system for identifying and learning from the important episodes in our lives — positive and negative, rewarding and threatening — but it also ignores a lot of other information in the process.

This is particularly relevant to the world of marketing and consumer behavior. Emotion and memory operate together as ingredients in consumer responses to marketing messages, brands, and products. Sometimes they operate at a conscious level; more often they operate at a nonconscious level. At both levels, they help us navigate our way through a massive amount of information every day. But much of this process is not accessible to our conscious minds, so we can’t report reliably on it if asked.