What emotional connection are you building with your audience?
The businesses and brands that spark basic and universal human emotions will be the ones that develop and sustain a lasting emotional connection with their audience.
But what are our basic universal emotions?
A widely accepted theory of basic emotions and their expressions developed by Dr Paul Ekman, suggests we have six:
😠 Anger
😒 Disgust
😁 Happiness
😬 Fear
🙁 Sadness
😮 Surprise
(Originally Dr Paul Ekman, a contemporary psychologist who studied emotions and facial expressions during the 1960s, identified the six basic emotions. His further research shows the strongest evidence to date of a seventh emotion, which is Contempt).
So what are emotions ?
“Emotions are a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and a set of psychological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation." - Paul Ekman, PhD
…and what makes us emotional ?
Emotions occur in response to some kind of stimulus (actual, imagined, or re-lived) such as:
● a physical event
● a social interaction
● remembering or imagining an event
● talking about, thinking about, or physically reenacting a past emotional experience.
What actually makes us emotional, however, varies person to person based on our shared evolution, cultural influences and unique personal experiences. So, even though we can't choose the emotions we feel, we can choose the ways in which we respond through emotional awareness.
