7: Feelings
The concept of "feelings" is not very well considered, and is inconsistently defined and applied throughout the social sciences. And as feelings are important to motivation, they merit careful consideration.
The previous chapters have established the notion of memory: a memory is a combination of sense-data to which associations are made. Those associations - whether a thing is good or bad, an action resulted in pleasant or unpleasant consequences - are our feelings.
This is significantly different to emotions. Emotions are higher-order, the results of more sophisticated learning and thinking patterns, and can exist independent of sense-data. We can be happy or sad "just because," and maintain that emotional state in spite of what we happen to encounter in real-time, though emotions can arise because of feelings.
The two are related, but not synonymous, and can be harmonious or conflicted.
On their most basic level, feelings deal with a reaction to some specific stimulus, labeling that stimulus as good, bad, or indifferent. More than one memory may be associated to a given stimulus, hence more than one feeling may be associated to it - we can consider what makes us have certain feelings, as a logical exercise after the fact, but at the moment of experience, we simply feel what we feel.
It isn't a mathematical average, nor the strongest feeling wins. Nor is it possible to isolate a feeling and associate it to a specific memory because our sensation is broad - we sense many things in an environment, all at once.
Survival depends on feelings. In any given moment, we are aware of the state of the body, the state of the environment, and the state of the brain (mood). To survive, we must act on our feelings (or refrain from taking action), considering both our immediate and long-term needs, our personal and social goals.
And while there is much excitement about the new insights of brain-scanning, recall that this technique is extremely primitive at present. The instrumentation is not fast enough or precise enough to make a clear observation, and much of the theory is purely inferential. It offers some new insights, but still has quite a long way to go to achieve precision.
Attention And Touch Points
The first task of the marketer is to get the attention of the prospect - the prospect must be aware of a product as a first step toward purchasing it. The current view of marketing includes "touch points" to include instances in which the brand attempts to come to the attention of the prospect.
Advertising is an attempt to reach the customer in a non-buying environment (via the television in the prospect's home, the radio in their car, a sign they may drive or walk past). In retailing, it is done through packaging and in-store promotions.
This is not promotion - the goal is not to sell the product immediately, but merely to get the brand to be recognized, so they will recall it at a later date when a buying decision is to be made. This is not merely to create a bundle of sense-data (color and shape of the product), nor merely to identify it (to recall the name of the brand in association with the data), but also to have positive feelings about it.
If feelings are overlooked, and they often are, advertising can do more harm than good. The prospect may remember the brand, and have negative feelings about it, making it less likely rather than more likely they will wish to purchase it when the time comes.
That is, not all attention is good attention. Put your logo on a car pay a driver to cut people off in traffic, or put your logo on a hat of a bum who shouts obscenities at people in the street, and the brand will get attention. The name of the brand will be recognized, and memory will be formed - but a bad memory, associated to negative feelings.
What is often forgotten, or pointedly ignored, is that each "touch" is not a unique - it feeds into an existing gestalt. That is, the sense-data is compared to experience and past knowledge, either of the same brands or similar ones, and considered in that context. This reflects the difference between feelings and instincts - specifically, that feelings will vary among individuals and can change over time, whereas instincts do not.
Returning to the notion of attention: not every sensation that a person receives is noticed. We receive constant sense data from the environment, too much to pay attention to everything. As such, it is theorized that the mind has an "attentioning system" that gathers all incoming sense data and determines which should be given attention and which should be ignored. As a result, some sensations draw our attention, while others do not.
Though it's generally considered that we focus on the strongest sensations, or that anything "new" commands attention, it is not invariably so. This was noticed with radar operators in the second World War, who periodically failed to give attention to new "blips" on their screen: even though the screen was all they were paying attention to, and even though the new blips were the strongest sensation, they failed to notice them.
There are also instances in which a sensation gathers more attention than it would seem to merit by virtue of its intensity. In a noisy environment, your attention will be taken immediately by someone whispering your name, especially if it is a voice that your recognize
The author refers to the theories of Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Oxford, who maintains that stimuli are prioritized by "concentric waves of neural recruitment" - associated stimuli being gathered into a gestalt, such that the gestalt rather than the stimuli are assessed. That is to say that the most prominent stimulus, such as the brightest color, does not draw attention if it is outweighed by a collection of less prominent ones.
Another factor in attention is memory and experience: certain stimuli resound, or fail to resound, because of a person's individual experience. A person who works in an industrial mill where a machine makes a loud noise, like a gunshot, will barely notice when a car backfires. A war veteran will have a strong reaction to the same noise based on his experience with gunfire. A person with neither experience may notice it but give it little attention. In that way, the memory of the individual is more important than the quality of the stimulus in determining whether it gets attention.
Greenfield's explanation of this phenomenon is related to pharmacology rather than psychology: chemical compounds called amines (serotonin, acetylcholine, dopamine, neropinephrine and histamine) that are used to communicate among synapses. From this perspective, neurons become specialized or biased to releasing certain of these chemicals (neuromodulation) - and the bias can last for a relatively short period of time or a significantly longer one. As a result, the mind itself becomes biased to certain stimuli - it becomes "used to" releasing specific chemicals in response to specific stimuli: dopamine makes some clusters of neurons more excitable, serotonin makes them less excitable, which in turn makes the mind prone to a customary response to a given stimuli - to give it more or less attention than it would gain in one person's brain than in that of another person who lacks experience, hence lacks bias.
Aside of their function in the unconscious mind, filtering stimuli to determine what is noticed, this also resounds in the conscious mind, which is focused on the most dominant gestalt. Noted: the most dominant gestalt may not be particularly strong - when there is little stimulation, even a minor stimulus can be most dominant.
A side note: this may be why television advertising is highly effective. Television is a form of entertainment that has a pacifying effect, almost like hypnosis, that makes the viewing audience relaxed and receptive to suggestion. This is why marketers find success when they enter into any leisure environment, to ambush people when they are in a relaxed state with their defenses down.
Defining Feelings, Moods, and Emotions
Until the mid-1990's, science had little understanding about feelings, moods, and emotions, and had not done much investigation into the subject. Even psychology, which concerns itself with the human brain, treated them as an irregular aberration whose origins were not understood, and which needed to be suppressed or controlled because they interfere with rational thought. If they weren't the cause or symptom of a disorder, human emotions were regarded as unimportant. Even in the present day, scientific exploration of emotions has just begun.
It is generally assumed that "everybody knows" what emotions, feelings, and moods are because they have first-hand experience with them. But they don't really understand them: ask anyone, layman or scientist, to define what a feeling or emotion is, and they will struggle and provide a vague and unsatisfactory answer.
The author considers a few different dictionary and textbook definitions of feeling, mood, and emotion and explains why they are not satisfactory. Ultimately, I find myself lost in the tangle of "what isn't" and "what is," but I think what the author arrives at is this:
- A feeling is a subjective reaction to stimulus, a vague sense of positive or negative
- An emotion is a named amalgam of feelings that conveys a relatively specific, but still subjective, "bundle" of reactions: happiness, sadness, excitement, anger, fear, or love.
- A mood is a persistent internal state in which an individual is biased to react in a specific way to external stimuli.
To go a bit further, the author considers "personality" as the customary moods, emotions, and feelings for a given individual, based on their experiences - that is, the person's default setting and automatic reactions.
He expresses some concern that the terms are used inconsistently. When each author and researcher defines emotions differently, it's hard to interpret the research, and even harder to draw correlations when various researchers each has a slightly different concept of the term.