When looking through our Target Audience Analysis Reports, you'll notice that a persona usually has a single emotional response. If that emotion is positive, great! But what if it's negative? Can we change it?

The short answer is yes. Emotions are subjective and, therefore, can be changed. Let's take a look at how we can do that, step by step.

Why Change Emotions?

The first question to ask is: why do we want to change emotions? The answer is simple: because emotions dictate behavior. When we want to change behaviors, we need to change the underlying emotions, and nature will take care of the rest.

Understanding Emotional Triggers

Any emotional episode starts with a trigger. An emotional trigger consists of three components:

1. Context: This refers to the situation we are in. For example, are we at the theater watching a play, skiing in the Alps, or driving? It's important to note that our behavior can vary significantly depending on the context.

2. Stimuli: This is about what is objectively reaching our senses. Are we seeing or hearing something? Has something changed in our sense of balance? If the intensity of a stimulus crosses a certain threshold, we will react, and that reaction is emotionally dictated. For example, seeing your beloved pet may evoke enjoyment, leading to the behavior of savoring the moment.

NB! Keep in mind that we have more than five senses, with up to 33 documented to date - meaning that there are many ways to make a trigger happen. And because we can experience an emotion by simply recalling a stimulus - think about your love and you will feel happy, no need to see it here and now to experience enjoyment.

‍

3. Subjective filter: This refers to how we interpret a particular context and stimulus. For example, imagine you're in class at school, and a colleague invites you to their birthday party on Sunday. If you're an extrovert, you might feel happy and interpret the invitation as something good. Your emotional response is enjoyment, and your behavioral response is to seek more of that enjoyment. On the other hand, if you're an introvert, you might interpret the same invitation as a loss because you prefer individual activities and know that the school year will end soon.

‍

Changing Emotions: Examples

Now that we understand emotional triggers, let's explore how we can change our emotions.

What follows is a mental experiment, and I hope you will be pleasantly surprised to discover how accurate your intuition is about these emotions, confirmed with real-world data:

Smoking and Disgust

Consider the case of smoking. There is a subjective filter at work that associates the sight of a cigarette package with sensory pleasure, leading to an emotional response of enjoyment. This, in turn, leads to a behavioral response of seeking more cigarettes.

How can we change this behavior? One approach is to evoke a different emotion, such as disgust. Simply lecturing people about the dangers of smoking through warnings may not be effective, and changing the context might not be feasible either.

However, we can work with the stimulus. We can utilize the subconscious associations in our brains that keep us away from potential poisons. For instance, consider Trypophobia, the fear of uneven holes.

By patterning cigarette packs or even the cigarettes themselves with such images, we can create a sense of disgust. The more a person is exposed to these images, the stronger the association will become, eventually leading to their last cigarette.

Smoking and Sadness

Beside disgust, we can evoke another emotion: sadness. We can replace the visual stimulus of disturbing images with the stimulus of steep pricing. As cigarettes become more expensive, the feeling of loss and sadness when purchasing them will increase. One day, the sadness will be overwhelming, leading to the response of withdrawal from smoking.

This is the conclusion of our experiment; what are the reasons (and underlying emotions) behind smoke cessation?  Research shows that “a decision that smoking was too expensive” was the third most commonly cited trigger of respondents’ most recent quit attempt (with the two most common triggers being future or current health concerns).

Observe how Disgust - the emotion that signals potential poison - and Sadness -  the emotion that signals potential losses - are the emotional drivers behind smoking cessation behavior.

In conclusion, understanding emotional triggers and how to change them is a powerful tool. By targeting specific emotions and using creative strategies, we can help people change their behaviors and improve their lives.

If you want to learn more about how to change emotions, drop us a line. We’re happy to provide guidance and support.