Measuring Emotions

Reading the latest edition of Research Magazine I was immediately drawn to the article ‘The Appliance of Science’. Some interesting comments were certainly made about MRI and EEG and the like but I’m afraid I still feel there is a huge amount of folklore out there about emotion.

Most grating of all is the continual insistence that emotions are in some way divorced from rationality.  This is not the message at all, the two are interlinked. To paraphrase thoughts and feelings start with an appraisal. The key thing about emotions is not ‘I am happy’ but ‘I am happy because….’ its not the emotion word alone that counts but what the emotion means, for Richard Lazarus the cognitive-motivational-relational context. In this way a stress response alone is meaningless without an understanding of its context; indeed many key emotions would not register except through verbal report yet absolutely ‘relate to’ action-readiness. See Zeelenberg on regret and dissapointment.

In many cases then they are mixed up with a cognitive context – think guilt, shame, regret and so forth.

Further, you can have negative and positive emotions occuring at the same time! How would you deal with that?  A hotel company we dealt with spoke about how their most loyal customers were also those most likely to express a negative emotion precisely because they were so heavily engaged with the company. If you did not understand the meaning behind the emotion you would assume negative emotions were important to loyalty.

I think emotions also tell us something about attitude – customer satisfaction and the like – the negative is resonant i.e., ‘losses speak loader than gains’ to use a misquotation. We can push and push for higher satisfaction scores but perhaps what we are really looking at in their current measure is actually the extent to which they reduce dissatisfaction.