1、EMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLDAUTHORSManuel Garcia-Garcia,Ph.D.Davide BaldoRich Timpone,Ph.D.A cross-cultural framework for emotion measurementSeptember 2023IPSOS VIEWSDue to its critical role in customer experience,advertising effectiveness,brand building and other drivers of business growth,great atten

2、tion has been placed on emotions in recent decades.New advances in cognitive sciences and neuroscience have also ushered in new insights and approaches for their measurement.During this time,researchers have explored different approaches to capture the emotional response of the consumer,including me

3、asuring physiological signals of respondents(i.e.physical bodily sensations)and looking at the brains electrical responses.While valuable advances have been made,there is still a need for clarifying what is meant by emotions and how to capture this in valid,scalable cost-effective ways.The disruptio

4、n of human lab studies during Covid accelerated progress on this front.This paper provides an overview of the Ipsos Emotion Framework-which builds on academic research-and clarifies how we are approaching the domain of emotions,and how this can be measured in valid,comprehensive,scalable,and afforda

5、ble ways.This framework can be applied to help us understand commonalities and differences between cultures and in turn help us predict reactions to marketing stimuli,as well as experiences and social events.Bringing these pieces together allows for planning more impactful action based on the insigh

6、ts around emotion.IPSOS EMOTION FRAMEWORK WHAT IS EMOTION?Everyone has an understanding of what emotions are,but when we move to measuring them,it is revealed that each of us are viewing them differently from each other.This can be seen by comparing several definitions found in respected dictionarie

7、s.The Oxford English Dictionary definesemotion as“a natural instinctive state ofmind deriving from ones circumstances,mood,or relationships with others”.Merriam-Webster defines it as“aconscious mental reaction(such as angeror fear)subjectively experienced as strongfeeling usually directed toward a s

8、pecificobject and typically accompanied byphysiological and behavioral changes inthe body”.The Cambridge English Dictionary says its“a strong feeling such as love or anger,orstrong feelings in general.Even across these three dictionaries,emotion is defined either as an instinctive state of mind,a co

9、nscious mental reaction,or directly as a feeling three very different constructs.Moving to a common scientifically-based definition can avoid confusion about the concept and provide a sound foundation to build from.We use the academic definition adopted by The Advertising Research Foundation,from Pr

10、ofessors Davidson,Scherer and Goldsmith which states that“emotion refers to a relatively brief episode of coordinated brain,autonomic/interoceptive and behavioral changes that facilitate a response to an external or internal event of significance for the organism”.1 Emotional labels or constructs,su

11、ch as anger or fear,then define the subjective representation of the emotional experience.We therefore build from influential theories of emotion in psychology and neuroscience that demonstrate that we first experience a physiological response to a stimulus(emotion),and then interpret that emotional

12、 experience as defined by an emotional construct.For instance,you may notice an increase in heart rate and sweaty palms,and then interpret those sensations as fear2.The Ipsos Emotion Framework provides a structured and scalable approach for capturing and quantifying emotional responses across countr

13、ies and cultures.Figure 1:What is emotion?Eliciting stimulusAutonomous arousalConscious emotion(FEAR)Subcortal activity in thalamusA“relatively brief episode of coordinated brain,autonomic and behavioral changes that facilitate a response to an external or internal event of significance for the orga

14、nism”.23IPSOS VIEWS|EMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLDEMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLD|IPSOS VIEWS ARE EMOTIONS UNIVERSAL?Emotions are defined not only by physiological experiences,but also by our evaluations and the meaning we attribute to them.Part of the reason emotions are so difficult to define is because the

15、physiological experience is not necessarily specific to only one emotion and may be common across several emotions.For example,physical changes,such as increased heart rate,may be similarly present in the emotional experience of fear or surprise.Once we evaluate and interpret these physical changes,

16、we attribute meaning to them in the form of an emotional construct or label.These emotional constructs or labels,such as happy,angry,or frustrated,are strongly dependent on context and culture.The construction of emotion is so connected to the cultural experience that,even for emotional constructs t

17、hat were once believed universal,such as fear and anger,it is not clear if they have the same meaning across languages.In addition,some constructed emotional concepts,such as schadenfreude in Germany,awumbuk in Papua New Guinea,gezelig in the Netherlands etc.,are known to be unique to a culture and

18、a language.Interestingly,recent research3 has found supporting evidence for significant differences in emotional concepts across families of languages,with the closer the languages,the greater the similarities.Critically though,this research demonstrates a universal structure to define all emotional

19、 labels within all language families,differentiating emotions primarily based on core underlying dimensions,the main ones being Valence,Arousal,and Control.Figure 2:Universality of emotionsFigure 3:Emotional constructs mapped onto three dimensions Valence,Arousal and ControlThe three main dimensions

20、 are:1.Valence categorises the positive versusnegative direction of an emotional response,ranging from extreme pain or unhappiness at one end to extreme happiness or ecstasy at the other end.For example,an ad story could leave us with positive emotions,and a frustrating customer experience could pla

21、ce us on the negative end of that spectrum.2.Arousal refers to the intensity of anemotional response,the physiological and psychological degree of alertness,excitement,or engagement,ranging from sleep,through intermediate states of drowsiness,and followed by alertness,with frenzied excitment at the

22、opposite extreme.For example,an easy user experience could make us feel calm,but both an exhilarating,fun rollercoaster ride and a public policy we disagree with,could both elicit intense emotions,and would thus constitute states of high arousal.3.Control relates to the degree to which aperson feels

23、 they have an influence over the situation,ranging from feelings of total lack of control to the feeling in complete control.An example might be consumers experiences with financial products.When something is unusual or hard to understand,this would illicit a feeling of a lack of control.Using these

24、 three dimensions,we can map the emotional constructs people describe and get a better understanding of what they mean when they say they feel a certain way(see Figure 3).While Valence and Arousal are the main dimension for all language families and most contexts we have explored,Control adds import

25、ant insights in some areas,like customer experience,healthcare and specific industries.According to these definitions,“emotion”does not merely include occasional passionate states.Rather,a person is viewed as being in some emotional state at all times,a state that can be described as a region within

26、 the SukhaARE EMOTIONAL CONSTRUCTS LIKE FEAR&ANGER UNIVERSAL?SchadenfreudeAwumbukGezeligSisuDadirriSource:Ipsos Emotion Cross-Cultural Research5050100ScaredVALENCEAROUSALCONTROLAngerSadnessSurprisedExcitedJoy45IPSOS VIEWS|EMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLDEMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLD|IPSOS VIEWSthree

27、-dimensional space created by these core underlying dimensions.Emotional experiences,states and constructs can be mapped onto these three dimensions.Since emotional constructs are heavily driven by context and culture,we are not aiming here to present an exhaustive list of them.However,it is very va

28、luable to map constructed emotional labels onto empirically measured emotional dimensions.This classification provides a good understanding of the underlying emotion and an empirical framework where different complex emotional constructs can be measured and compared.The measurement of Valence-Arousa

29、l-Control(VAC)is comparable to a postal code;while it might present some variability on the precise location of the emotional construct,it does provide an accurate picture of the region they are in.Once we were able to map emotional constructs against the three dimensions,we then further developed o

30、ur framework in order to measure and leverage these constructs.This involved:developing a science-based,scalable,and affordable approach to measure emotion consistently across cultures and applications,based on VAC dimensions.developing a database of emotionalconstructs generated culture,and measura

31、ble and comparable across cultures,that could allow the empirical measurement of emotional constructs through text analytics,i.e.,detecting sentiment of open-ended answers,social media posts,customers reviews,etc.Use of this cross-cultural empiricalapproach to measure emotional responses based on th

32、e VAC dimensions to develop predictive models for behaviours and attitudes.INSIGHTS FROM IPSOS ORIGINAL RESEARCH ON EMOTION MEASUREMENT We move now from the conceptual discussion to practical findings from our research on research and insights gained on the measurement of the emotion dimensions.Subs

33、tantial research on the creation of survey measures and their validation was conducted resulting in scalable items that tap the underlying dimensions accurately and can be incorporated into many survey and other studies.The simplicity and scalability of this approach,combined with its strong scienti

34、fic rigour,makes it an appropriate tool to capture the emotional response of citizens and consumers.Additionally,we conducted research across six different markets and languages,namely the United States,Mexico,Brazil,France,Saudi Arabia,and China,as part of the validation and to evaluate consistency

35、 of the dimensions across cultures and languages.This also provides the foundations for a database of emotional constructs that are mapped to VAC in native languages.While the use cases span practical business studies,across each market,the validation leveraged Ipsoss ground truth database of images

36、(Ipsos Database of Emotional Pictures)4 that has been used for surveys as well as multichannel neuroscience validation5.THE QUESTIONS YOU ASK MATTER The first insight of the measurement seems to be obvious:the wording of the questions asked matters.However,we found that even measures used in academi

37、c literature could have issues and the need for testing and validating in each language is important for accuracy.For instance,the wording of the Arousal scale(the intensity of the emotion),could bias the responsetoward either positive or negative Valence.We found consistently across three languages

38、 that some specific survey wording could generate language-driven correlations between these two dimensions,either on a negative bias(wording 2),or a V-shaped distribution(wording 3)as seen in the Brazil tests over the page.The first insight of the measurement seems to be obvious,that the wording of

39、 the questions asked matters.67IPSOS VIEWS|EMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLDEMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLD|IPSOS VIEWS VAC DIFFERENCES AND COMMONALITIES ACROSS COUNTRIES After developing and testing the measurement scales in each language and market,we are able to compare the results across them.Comparing the re

40、sults across the different markets,we were able to identify nuances in ratings across countries for Valence,Arousal and Control.This shows the impact of culture and language on the experienced emotional construct for each dimension with the greatest consistency on Valence and reinforces the value of

41、 measuring all three dimensions.Figure 5:VAC across culturesSource:Ipsos Emotion Cross-Cultural ResearchSource:Ipsos Emotion Cross-Cultural ResearchFigure 4:The questions you askAROUSALVALENCE00070809010SAUDI ARABIAN=194 r=0.02 p=0.90BRAZIL-WORDING 1AROUSALVALENCE100

42、8060402000070809010N=95 r=0.26 p=0.174B-BRAZILAROUSALVALENCE00070809010CHINAAROUSALVALENCE00070809010US4A-US,KSA,CHINAN=191 r=-0.11 p=0.58N=194 r=0.44 p=0.02AROUSALVALENCE0007080901009070503

43、010BRAZIL-WORDING 2N=95 r=-0.91 p=0.00BRAZIL-WORDING 3AROUSALVALENCE00070809010N=93 r=0.16 p=0.39VAC ratings differed across countries for Valence,Arousal and Control,showing an impact of culture and language on the experienced emotion for each dimension with the mos

44、t consistency on the Valence dimensionVALENCEAROUSALCONTROLVALENCE(mean)AROUSAL(mean)CONTROL(mean)60555045406055504540USCNKSABRFRMXUSCNKSABRFRMX6055504540USCNKSABRFRMX89IPSOS VIEWS|EMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLDEMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLD|IPSOS VIEWS DATABASING EMOTIONAL CONSTRUCTS FOR DEEPER CROSS-CULTURA

45、L UNDERSTANDING Digging into the database of results by market and image,we are able to go deeper anduncover more insight in the nuances that VAC identifies.Interestingly,emotional constructs that were once believed to be universal,might present meaningful differences across cultures.No emotional co

46、nstruct is believed to be as universal as“happy”.However,when we look at the comparison between US English and KSA Arabic,we see that while“happy”and“(”happy”inArabic)are rated equally on Valence,they differ meaningfully on Arousal.Particularly for global organisations,it is critical to be able to c

47、apture these differences when measuring the emotional response of customers and citizens.This system is thus capable of showcasing important conceptual differences on similar or translated emotional constructs across cultures and languages.We can,thus,capture differences across cultures,unlike exist

48、ing databases which have been developed using translations,generally from US English.A cross-cultural database also provides the ability to identify cultural differences in the reaction to individual stimuli.An interesting example was the picture of a graveyard,which evoked different emotional respo

49、nses across cultures.As you can see in Figure 7,while Chinese respondents rated the picture on a negative Valence/low Arousal space with terms like solemn,desolate,mourning,French respondents used a wider distribution across Arousal,and US respondents rated the picture on a narrower range especially

50、 across Arousal,with terms like calm,peaceful,quiet.Figure 6:Common constructs across countriesFigure 7:Cultural variation across countriesSource:Ipsos Emotion Cross-Cultural ResearchSource:Ipsos Emotion Cross-Cultural ResearchSimilar stimuli could evoke very different emotional responses in differe

51、nt marketsdeadlonelinessAROUSALVALENCE00070809010grievingcalmingseriousnessquietafraiddesolatesolemnsaddensgrieveddrearyhushedmournfulsadchillyheavinessquietsadcalmcoldpeacefuldeathnonesombersorrowcreepydepressedgriefquietsadnesscalmcoldwinterrestfulcemetarygriefmela

52、ncholysnowneutralpeacepainChinaUSAFranceVALENCE-AROUSALBRAZILAROUSALVALENCE00070809010fearhorrordisgustangerpanicsadnessdeathpityviolencenonelovejoyhappyfunexcitednaturecalmAROUSALVALENCE00070809010USpanicfearhorrorviolenceangersadnes

53、spitydeathnoneexcitedfunhappyjoylovenaturecalmdisgustSAUDI ARABIAviolencehorrornonedeathsadnesspitycalmnaturelovejoyexcitedfunhappydisgustpanicangerfearAROUSAL09070503010VALENCE00708090100MEXICOAROUSALVALENCE00070809010AROUSALVALENCE0

54、0070809010FRANCEhorrorpityviolenceangerpanicdisgustfearsadnessdeathfunexcitedlovejoyhappycalmnaturenonepanichorrordeathdisgustpitynonecalmnaturelovehappyjoyfunexcitedsadnessCHINAAROUSAL09070503010VALENCE00708090100violenceangerfearpityfearangerdisgusthorro

55、rnonelovehappyjoynaturefunexcitedcalmsadnesspanicdeathviolence1011IPSOS VIEWS|EMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLDEMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLD|IPSOS VIEWS ADVERTISING TESTING Applying this framework to advertising executions provides additional information in the context of the emotional response elicited by mark

56、eting communication.Moreover,it can help identify and predict short and long-term impact of the communication strategy on the consumer.KEY BENEFITS TO ADVERTISING RESEARCH:The Ipsos Emotion Framework allowscapturing the emotional response to ads which is strongly predictive of advertising effectiven

57、ess and the communication strategy through key indicators such as recall and brand effects.It also provides a powerful diagnostic roleto understand the impact of the campaign on the customer,by providing the user-generated emotions elicited by the campaign,as well as the emotional drivers of success

58、.BRAND REJECTION This framework has also been applied to better understand brand equity and explain the drivers for brand consideration and brand rejection.We found that VAC and especially valence could help further understand why some people reject specific brands,and identify the drivers,particula

59、rly the emotional ones,that bring consumers closer to a brand.KEY BENEFITS TO BRAND PERFORMANCE:The Ipsos Emotion Framework providesadditional value to explain brand rejection as well as drivers of brand consideration and equity.It provides diagnostic value for importantstrategic issues of brand con

60、sideration,equity and explicit brand rejection.THE VALUE OF MEASURING EMOTIONAL CONSTRUCTS IN PRACTICE These are some practical business examples where we found that using VAC and user-generated emotional labels(in their language and context)provides extraordinary value for the understanding of citi

61、zens and consumers.Since this scalable approach is so easy to implement,there are many additional applications where it can also produce actionable insights.CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE In a cross-market study,this framework helped assess how customers felt at various moments during their experience with pro

62、ducts and services(i.e.,customer experience)and how their feelings impact overall perceptions of the brand and brand-related behaviour and attitudes.This identified opportunities to most effectively improve the experience and better fulfil customers needs at key moments.KEY BENEFITS TO CUSTOMER EXPE

63、RIENCE:The Ipsos Emotion Framework allowscapturing emotional response to identify the strength of their predictive power on customer outcomes(attitudinal and behavioural).It can be used diagnostically to understandhow to improve an experience at various points in the customer journey.We found that V

64、AC and especially Valence could help further understand why some people reject specific brands,and identify the drivers,particularly the emotional ones,that bring consumers closer to a brand.1213IPSOS VIEWS|EMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLDEMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLD|IPSOS VIEWS REFERENCES 1.Davidson,R.J.,Sch

65、erer,K.R.and Goldsmith,H.H.(2002)Handbook of Affective Sciences.New York:Oxford University Press.2.Lisa Feldman Barrett(2018).How Emotions Are Made.Pan Books Ltd.3.Jackson,J.C.,Watts,J.,Henry,T.R.,List,J-M,.Forkel,R.,Mucha,P.J.,Greenhill,S.J.,Gray,R D.and Linquist,K.A.(2019).Emotional semantics show

66、 both cultural variation and universal structure.Science Vol.366,Issue 6472,pp.1517-1522 DOI:10.1126/science.aaw81604.Baldo,D.,Venkatraman,V.,and Timpone,R.(2020).Building an Ipsos Emotional Ground TruthDatabase.Scientific report,Global Science Organization,Ipsos.5.Baldo,D.,Viswanathan,V.,Timpone,R.

67、,and Venkatraman,V.(2022)The heart,brain,and body ofmarketing:Complementary roles of neurophysiological measures in tracking emotions,memory,and ad effectiveness.Psychology&Marketing 39(10):pp1979-1991 CONCLUSION Moving from a muddled approach to understanding what emotions are,to a systemic framewo

68、rk with clear simple measurement has value.Further,this has allowed us to demonstrate the clear predictive power of emotions on business questions ranging from customer experience to brand equity and advertising effectiveness to the explicit rejection of brands.Emotional constructs are not universal

69、 but can be mapped onto emotional dimensions(Valence,Arousal,Control)and integrated with the measurement of the emotional experience to systematically address business questions.There are clear insights from the validation and development of this framework that are worth noting.Not surprisingly,the

70、words you use in your questions matter a lot,and testing to avoid word-driven bias is particularly important.VAC ratings show interesting similarities and differences across cultures when databasing emotional constructs,mapped onto VAC ratings,and there is great value in exploring cultural transfera

71、bility of emotional measurement and constructs across markets.Consider the foundational dimensions andleverage VAC and mapped emotional constructs for predictive modelling.This framework helps bring simplicity to the substantive insights and helps clients to be sure about the role and value of emotions in thebrands,products and services.15EMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLD|IPSOS VIEWS14IPSOS VIEWS|EMOTIONS AROUND THE WORLD