MISSING: The Sources of our Feelings.

By Gregg Miller
July 9, 2010
What do you do when you get sad and find yourself in a bad mood? I for one try and reflect on what has happened in that day, that week, that month, and find the root of the issue in the hopes of eradicating it forcibly and without mercy. Naturally, such efforts usually end in failure. Even if I can identify what might be making me feel so down, that knowledge rarely helps me get back on track emotionally. In fact, having that target just gives me a discernible target to which I can direct my brooding until some accidental incident comes along and I find myself feeling better all of a sudden.
Bear with me as I go off on a scientific tangent. I was reading a psychology article on a test scientists developed a few years ago that allows experimenters to measure people’s implicit attitudes on pretty much anything. This isn’t news by any means – at Sentient we have long been dedicated to gauging automatic brand associations using our ABA model. What got me thinking about this alternative technique, though, is that it is founded on the principle of “affect misattribution.” What this means is that you and I experience temporary swings in positive or negative emotion to varying degrees hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day and that we are absolutely terrible at judging the source of these swings. The researchers developed their model, called the Affect Misattribution Procedure (or AMP for short).
The way it works is that a person sits down in front of a computer screen and they will be pushed through a sequence of three screens. The first acts as a “prime,” an image with clear emotional signification such as dancing puppies or mentally deranged arsonists. After viewing this prime the individual is very briefly shown a Chinese character, presumably an image with cultural meaning entirely indecipherable, before being asked whether they found this individual character more or less positive than the average Chinese character. The brilliance of this exercise is that people actually differ in how they rate the character they’re viewing depending on whether they viewed a positive or negative visual prime immediately prior to it, yet they have no understanding that the prime is affecting them. This is where affect misattribution comes in – users respond on how the Eastern image makes them feel when in fact that change in mood or opinion came from a subconscious source.
What’s important to realize here is that this process translates into every domain of daily life, including the relentless exposure to brands and products we are bombarded with day in, day out. How we feel about these brands, the associations they bring to mind — positive or negative, yes, but also attitudes like “strength” or “femininity” or “status” — are constantly influencing us on a subconscious level.
So let’s bring this all back to crummy moods and vainglorious attempts to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps and back into the realm of sunshine and smiles. Given that as humans we are so prone to falling prey to affect misattribution on a task so minute as looking at Chinese characters in the highly controlled conditions of scientific experimentation, it seems absolutely ridiculous that we expect ourselves to be able to accurately identify the sources of our moods. Even if after much difficult introspection I find what appears to be a convincing source for my despair (it all must go back to that time in seventh grade when that guy with the blonde hair  told me I didn’t have any friends!), it’s much more likely that I have only settled on a feasible source. In fact, the real reason could have been something so mundane as arriving at my desk first thing in the morning and seeing that a colleague had borrowed my last pen. I’m not so sensitive that such a trivial event could ruin my day, but it’s entirely possible that a series of such minor disruptions could act in concert to produce enough negative emotion to do so. Most important to reflect on here is that all of those minor disruptions would be noticed by me on an entirely subconscious level, hence it being impossible for me to understand the source of my own feelings.
Basically the point I’m trying to make is that looking backward really might not be all that helpful, at least not at those times when you find yourself at a loss as to where that mood came from. Personally, I’m going to make more of an effort to look ever forward.
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