Emotions and the Eye
We’re all so steeped in the engineering paradigm for how our
brains and bodies work, that scientific findings like this
come as a surprise even though they shouldn’t. Our emotional
brains aren’t part of a computer system where vision, feelings,
heat and pain all run on different circuits. It’s all one big
system wrapped around itself. Via the blog Neurophilosophy, we
learn of a study by Canadian researchers that:
“provides the first direct evidence that the mood we are in
affects the way we see things by modulating the activity of
the visual cortex. Their findings show that putting on the
proverbial rose-tinted glasses of a good mood is not so much
about colour, but about the broadness of the view.”
They showed that influencing someone to be in a better mood,
by showing them faces of happy vs. sad faces, actually
improved their peripheral vision. The effect happened without
a negative cost to the information received in the central
vision field.
The message for us folks in advertising is clear. If you want
people to pay attention to what you’re saying, explosions and
loud noises may be exactly the wrong road to follow. Warm
them up and mellow them out first, and they’ll pay more
attention to what you show them.
Media choice and emotions
One question we hear from clients is, which media are most effective to achieve the maximum impact on the emotions, and on the brand. On judgment, it seems likely that a medium like television, where you can impact both auditory and visual senses, is likely to be more impactful than a one-dimensional medium, like print, or radio. Finding science to support that isn’t so easy, though. For that you need evidence that, for example, the emotions evoked by a piece of music are similar to, and can influence, other emotional experiences. So far the proof for that has been elusive.
But a new study, which has just been published in Neuroscience Letters, reported here, provides both behavioural and physiological evidence that the emotions evoked by music can be transferred to the sense of vision, and can influence how the emotions in facial expressions are perceived.
Two experiments were performed.
“In the first, 30 participants were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts, each lasting 15 seconds. After each piece of music, the participants were shown a photograph of a face, expressing either a happy, sad, or neutral expression. The photographs were flashed on a screen for 1 second, after which the participants were asked to rate the emotion on a 7-piont scale, where 1 denotes extremely sad and 7 extremely happy.
Thus, the visual emotional stimuli – the photos of faces – were “primed” by an emotional state conveyed by a piece of music. All the participants correctly identified the emotions expressed by the faces in the photographs presented to them. However, happy faces primed by a happy piece of music were rated as happier than when primed by sad music. Conversely, sad faces primed by a piece of sad music were rated as sadder than those primed with a happy piece of music. Finally, neutral faces were rated higher when primed by a happy piece of music and lower when primed by a sad piece.
The size of the priming effect for neutral faces was found to be almost twice that of the effect for happy and sad faces. [Emphasis mine]This may be because neutral faces contain less information than those expressing one emotion or the other, and hence are somewhat ambiguous. We know that the brain integrates information from different senses to construct representations of the external and internal worlds; thus, in the absence of relevant visual information, it may therefore become more reliant on information from other senses when generating these representations.”
If we think of the brand as a (relatively) emotion-neutral element, at least compared to the faces in this experiment, it seems obvious that the ability to prime the emotions with music makes an audiovisual medium more flexible, and potentially powerful, than a visual medium alone.
It was already known that music can influence the perception of emotions in visual stimuli when presented simultaneously, but this new study is the first to show the emotions evoked by music can affect the perception of emotional content in visual stimuli presented afterwards.
According to this study, these new findings also suggest that emotional processing takes place outside of conscious awareness, rather than being based on judgments and decisions.
