Measuring Emotions
Introduction
Ever since specialists in the human sciences realized that humans are emotional beings, marketers on the other side started inventing ways to measure these emotions for multiple reasons — improving sales, developing products, and testing ads. According to many behavioral studies, emotions have a direct impact on customer behavior and how they make decisions.
When we mention the term “measurement,” our discussion includes basics shared with every other type of measurement: frequency of measurement, timing of measurement, target sample, and so on. However, the substantial difference lies in the indicators used to measure emotions. Emotions differ from many other things being measured because of their complex nature — the contextuality of their appearance, their surfacing as a single emotion or as a mix of emotions at the same time, and the fact that some types are linked to the subconscious.
Recently, on the customer experience side, there’s been interest in measuring emotions to assess the emotional state at specific touchpoints in the customer’s journey toward a service or product. The conclusions drawn from measuring emotions at different stages are used to improve the customer experience, or to redesign that stage of the experience so its emotional impact is positive.
In this article, my aim is to touch on some of the most well-known scales and methods used to measure emotions, without giving a personal opinion preferring one over another. The selection process depends heavily on the goal behind the measurement.
Methods for Measuring Emotions
These divide into two main types: explicit methods and implicit methods.
Explicit Measurement Methods
This is the older method in terms of use by market research practitioners. It involves asking the targeted person directly about the emotions they experienced at a specific time or in a specific situation. These scales require expressing feelings by choosing words — and there lies their flaw, in the verbal expressions used, because they may not necessarily reflect the respondent’s feeling. That’s why image-based scales were later developed, requiring respondents to express feelings by choosing images. The most well-known image-based scale is the one used in hospitals to determine the level of pain a patient feels — used when the patient cannot speak because of devices in their mouth, or due to language barriers. It’s called the Wong-Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale.
Advantages of Explicit Measurement Methods
Ease of execution, speed of execution, no need for equipment, and the ability to apply across a wide geographic area.
Drawbacks of Explicit Measurement Methods
Respondent bias and the response that society accepts rather than the one expressing their actual emotional state — known as social desirability bias. Inability to express or describe the emotion, especially if it lies within the respondent’s subconscious. As for verbal scales specifically, they have the additional drawback of being difficult to apply across cultures due to problems translating emotional descriptors into several languages.
Examples of Verbal Explicit Scales
PANAS scale: displays a list of contrasting feelings and asks the respondent to express, on a five-point scale, the extent to which they feel each description. The results of the positive-feeling ratings and the negative-feeling ratings are then summed to provide an overall indicator of the respondent’s feeling.
More verbal explicit scales (titles only): RAS (Russell adjective scale), CMQ (current mode questionnaire), POMS (Profile of Mood State), UWIST mood adjective checklist, Brunel mood state, Mood inspection scale, DES (Differential Emotions Scale), MACL (Mood Adjective Checklist).
Examples of Image-Based Explicit Scales
Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM): one of the oldest image-based scales, using pictures containing figurines with different expressions, from which the respondent picks the figurine that best represents their feelings. After it, more visually appealing scales appeared in terms of design.
Geneva Emotion Wheel scale: twenty emotions arranged in a circle, with five points under each emotion to determine the emotion’s intensity. The respondent can choose several emotions if they want, to express their emotional state toward a particular thing, situation, or event. This scale is criticized for the abundance of options.
PrEmo (Product Emotion Measurement Instrument): the same idea as the previous scale, but instead of figurines, there are fourteen different characters (seven negative and seven positive), each representing a particular emotional state with different facial features. This scale is considered more effective at measuring mixed emotions than the previous one, and being image-based means it transcends cultural and linguistic barriers when used across wide geographic areas.
More image-based explicit scales (titles only): Affectbutton, AffectGrid, EmoCards, Feeltrace, SEI (Sensorial Evaluation Instrument), Smileyometer, Russkman emotions, Layered emotion measurement, GLS (Gaston Lagaffe Scale), Pick-A-Mood.
Sentiment Analysis Tools
Falling under explicit measurement are text-analysis systems that analyze emotional state by analyzing social media posts, classifying them as negative, positive, or neutral, and ultimately providing a detailed report on the general emotional state related to a particular topic. Note that some specialists do not consider these systems a tool for emotion analysis — even if they classify results into two or three categories, they remain far from some of the methods that can produce as many as forty-three different emotional classifications.
The market research industry has multiple practices on this side, most well-known of which is a data-collection method falling under qualitative research that involves accompanying the customer on their shopping trip and asking many questions when noticing particular reactions — including emotional reactions. This type of research is called shop-along research, for anyone wanting to look it up.
Implicit Measurement Methods
This method does not require asking the person whose emotions are being measured directly. From a scientific perspective, some of these methods are more accurate than those that ask the target to express their emotional state, because many of these tools rely on the biological changes that accompany emotion in the human body — in the skin, in heartbeat, in blood flow to specific areas of the brain, and so on. These changes are called the reactions that accompany emotion at the subconscious level. The most common practitioners of this method are neuroscientists and neuromarketers.
Advantages of Implicit Measurement Methods
No opportunity for respondent bias, and it doesn’t matter whether the respondent can express themselves or not, because these scales fundamentally don’t rely on the respondent’s words or choices.
Drawbacks of Implicit Measurement Methods
Difficulty of execution, the need for expensive equipment, difficulty applying across a wide geographic area, and the difficulty of interpreting results except by specialists.
Handwriting analysis is one method used to diagnose the emotional state the respondent was going through while writing — from handwriting patterns, the emotional state can be predicted, but only within the limits of whether the feelings are negative or positive. There’s also the method of monitoring heartbeat through a small device placed on the finger — based on the device’s reading and pulse patterns, particular emotional states can be predicted. There’s also a device that senses the skin and the changes occurring to it. All these methods are considered simple under the implicit approach.
There are other methods requiring complex medical equipment (e.g., MRI machines and devices with dozens of electrical sensors). These devices measure the activity occurring in the brain — either the level of blood flow to specific areas to supply them with more oxygen, the occurrence of which in specific areas of the brain is then interpreted in a particular way.
Systems that recognize emotions from facial features: do you remember the Flinch game app that asks users to film themselves, and in each round random users from around the world appear, and whoever smiles first loses while the other earns points? There are measurement devices similar to what this app does: something is shown in front of the target, and at the same time there’s a camera in front of them filming their face, connected to a software system that reads facial features and records the readings after automatically comparing them with a complex coding system for facial features called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The system that performs the analysis itself is called Automatic Facial Expressions Analysis.
There’s also the electromyography (EMG) device, which records the electrical signals of facial muscles and plays a similar role in analyzing reactions associated with particular emotional states, and the emotional state itself. But these methods still face the limitations of not being applicable anywhere, and the challenge of gathering targets and bringing them into the lab where these devices are available to run the tests on them.
Some organizations combine the two approaches to obtain more accurate results, or to fill the gap that might be missing in a particular scale by simultaneously using another scale.
Closing
The goal of this article is to raise awareness about emotion-measurement scales, not to recommend the use of one scale or one method over another. God knows best the intent.
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