A live version of the emotion analysis for this study is available here: https://dev-share.sticky.ai/#/e/EGcRTgCmC5HCCVU0L6vSk/d/DGf3EpPGDEsgQLaKZXqhR

In contrast to negative emotions, positive emotions seldom occur in response to life threatening situations. Therefore, joy and other positive emotions did not need to elicit focused attention and focused responses. Joy widens the mind, creating flexible responses, broadening the array of possible thoughts and options. Joy makes people want to push the limits, play and be creative in terms of physical, social, intellectual, and artistic tendencies.

This manifests in a variety of ways. An eye tracking study found that positive emotions lead to more attention on the periphery and wide visual search patterns (Wadlinger et al., 2006). People experiencing joy tend to be more inclusive, receptive to new information, and perform better on tests of creativity (Cohn and Frederickson, 2008).

These are all specific examples of a bigger behavioral pattern that build enduring personal resources. This phenomenon is called the broaden-and-build theory, that holds that the creative and open thinking elicited by joy allows people to broaden the scope for their environment and build out in the environment. The takeaway from this ‘broadening’ is that joyful people are more open to choose and may be willing to try a brand they haven’t yet tried. Kahn and Isen’s classic experiment on positive affect and choice showed that people with a mild positive affect facilitates variety-seeking among different consumer brands (Kahn and Isen, 1993). Therefore, videos or ads featuring a new brand or product should strive to elicit joy.

Since sadness is associated with loss, behavior manifests like loss as well. From an evolutionary perspective, sadness occurs when an individual was separated from the group -- lost. As mentioned earlier sadness is a hybrid between seeking and avoidance, and now I’ll go into more detail on that point. Picture an animal separated from its mother. You would expect the animal would initially look for its mother itself. After not finding her, it would withdraw. (Solms and Turnbull, 2002). Every child separated from their mother in the mall knows it’s easier to be found if you stay still, even though the instinct is to seek in that situation.

This behavioral pattern explains a few things about the emotion. Light sadness experienced for a short period of time can increase motivation. Experimenters showed participants either a happy film or a sad film and then gave them an untimed cognitive ability test to take. Since the test was untimed, the amount of time people spent on the test was indicative of perseverance and motivation. People who were shown the sad film spent 1.5x as long on the test, and got 1.5x as many questions correct as people who were shown the happy film (Forgas, 2016). This is the seeking phase of the emotion. It is also widely accepted that when people are extremely sad or experience sadness for long periods of time, motivation can be hard; this is avoidance.

Because sadness is a loss-prevention emotion, people who are experiencing sadness have a higher buying price for objects they desire, as Jennifer Lerner’s famous ‘Heart strings and purse strings’ experiment’ shows (Lerner, 2004). In simplistic evolutionary psychology terms, this is because people experiencing sadness want to make up for a loss by acquiring more goods.

People often view sad as a ‘bad’ emotion, but a light sadness for a limited period can be effective for people who make videos. Video ads can make people sad to increase motivation and willingness to pay, but just not *too* sad lest they decrease motivation.

Fear is a powerful motivator, changing priority weightings for goals and motivations by making safety the highest priority. Focus widens to find and avoid the danger, and long-term planning is near impossible. Fear can be thought of as both a seeking and an avoidance emotion, depending on the circumstances; this duality has been famously codified as the “fight or flight” response. Fear with a solution elicits the ‘fight’ response and subsequent approach behavior, whereas fear without a solution the ‘flight’ response and subsequent avoidance behavior.

Even though fear widens a person’s field of vision to scan for potential dangers, a study on emotions and attention found that fear makes people less distractible. People experiencing fear were more likely to notice a second stimuli (Vermeulen, 2009). Therefore, fear can be used effectively to capture attention; however, a solution must be presented, or else people will avoid rather than seek the stimulus. The best way to leverage fear in creating visual content is to present a specific danger and a specific solution. In the case of specific dangers, fear increases purchase intent only if the product is perceived to reduce the perceptions of danger (McDaniels et al., 1984). However, the risk in using fear marketing tactics is the potential, through nonspecific messaging, to elicit the flight instead of the fight response.

It is also worth noting that fear activates specialized learning systems. When people are afraid, they associate everything in their surroundings with that emotion, and they remember the specific sequences of events that led to that emotion. Therefore, fear plays especially well with educational efforts, à la Mothers Against Drunk Driving and anti-smoking campaigns.

As you can probably assume, surprise is good at capturing attention. In his article “Surprise: A shortcut for attention?”, Pierre Baldi makes a mathematical argument for surprise’s importance in capturing attention. Baldi argues that while searching for information, there are competitive inputs at play: Those that are relevant to the objective of the search, and those that are unexpected or surprising while searching.

Using a bayesian approach and after several mathematical models and equations, Baldi concluded that surprise can act as a shortcut to relevance but is not a perfect substitute. In other words, surprise takes precedence over relevance in the short term.

Surprise can therefore be the best emotional cue for capturing attention in the short term, especially in the case of irrelevant information (pre-roll video ads that play over what you wanted/expected to watch). Surprise is also very useful in building an object’s shareability. Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger put forth the following model of a four-step process a person undergoes as they experience surprise in their 2015 book Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected: 1) Freeze, when the unexpected stops us in our tracks. 2) Find, when we attempt to explain what’s going on. 3) Shift, when we change our perspective based on the new findings. 4) Share, when we feel the need to share our surprise (and the object of our surprise) with others. Surprise is therefore also the best emotion for shareability and for measuring a video’s potential to go viral.

Disgust is the most basic avoidance emotion, triggering strong goals to expel the stimuli. Because of this, disgust should be avoided. In the same ‘Heart strings and purse strings’ article mentioned in the sadness discussion, Lerner discovered that disgust decreases buying and selling prices (Lerner, 2004). And in a different study on emotions and attention, researchers discovered that disgust makes people more distractible; people experiencing disgust were less likely to notice a second stimuli (Vermeulen, 2009). The authors theorized that this is because the disgust response reduces sensory exposure. Therefore, disgust is the kryptonite for trying to capture attention or sell something, as it lowers attention and makes the object unpalatable and undesired. Video marketers should avoid the emotion at all costs. Unless you’re making a comedy, avoid disgust because it can be a strong avoidance signal to your viewers.

Puzzlement is not one of Ekman’s original universal emotions where this would instead be Anger. Normally anger is defined as a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility and usually something to stay clear from. On the Sticky app, we use the label Puzzlement to describe the facial expressions of a furrowed brow, etc. which are also associated with anger. The expression could equally be anger or puzzlement depending on the context. In most cases media evoke puzzlement a lot more than anger and hence the label to make the analysis appropriate. Puzzlement and anger share cognitive processes (e.g. confusion, frustration), so they are not a world apart. The same can be true of, say, Disgust, which might be someone disagreeing with something rather than being disgusted. But again, they share a similar process (e.g. rejection, disliking, avoidance).