Emotions are a complex subject to deal with. To grasp the human behavior, one must understand the human emotions. Since people constantly change, it is easy to understand their emotions also change. Now let's look at how to measure emotions and what it's like to transform emotions.

Why is it important to measure emotions?

Understanding individuals necessitates an awareness of their emotions. Measuring emotions is one technique to achieve this; based on the results, we can then attempt to sustain or modify the emotion.

A person's current views and prior experiences interact with emotions to shape or cause conduct. They play a significant role in determining behavior. In the workplace, it's critical to monitor and control emotions on both an individual and interpersonal level.

On a personal level, emotion control leads to improved work performance, improved physical and psychological health, and better communication.

Positive client impact is demonstrated by interpersonal degree of emotion management, superior customer service quality, contentment, and better negotiation results. Additionally, in more intimate social settings, there are stronger perceptions of friend and colleague trust [1].

Customer Emotions

Customer experience is how a brand is perceived by the customer [2]. To create a good customer experience consists of creating good customer satisfaction and good customer emotions.

Customer satisfaction is if the customer's sense of 'completion' has been met. This happens when an expectation from the brand and the outcome are synchronous. Although customer satisfaction is important, it does not provide the brand with an insight on the future decisions a customer will make. Increasing the chances of the customer continue to buy the product, suggest and have loyalty over it is dependent on the strategy the company uses. To create this strategy, having information on customer's emotion on the product is very important [3]. 

Some reasons showing the importance of it:

• Emotionally attached customers are the most profitable customers [4].

• They are also highly involved and more symbolically related with the brand compared to lowly attached customers [4].

Understanding emotions of customers can benefit brands in many ways:

• Creating and sustaining positive emotion evoking behavior, in order to construct brand loyalty and brand awareness [5],

• Prevent negative emotions that create undesirable customer experience and their unfavorable outcomes to the brand [5],

• Change negative emotions to positive emotions by modifying the reason for the negative outcome.

Using certain measurements to understand the customer's opinions on a brand are important in creating a good brand value. There are two methods for collecting data on customer's feelings and thoughts on a product, service and the brand itself. One is sentiment analysis, the other is emotion analysis. Conducting and analyzing sentiment analyses are easier because they use introspective methods, this means they ask the customer for their feedback on the product or the service. The presentation of the tool is easy and collects data more or less. But sometimes people can't understand or correctly state their emotions, and their unconscious emotional responses [3]. So this may not be the best method for collecting data. Let's look into some methods for doing sentiment analysis and emotion analysis.

How to measure emotions

Most of the methods for measuring customer experience include sentiment analyses. These are information about the customer's attitude towards the brand. Customer sentiment are mostly considered as positive or negative and is easier to measure than emotions [6]. 

Some of these are:

• NPS: Net Promoter Score includes asking the customer how likely they are to recommend a product to another (friend, colleague etc.) on a scale of 1–10. Loyalty score increases as the points goes up, and decreases as they go down.

  • An enhancement of NPS is NPS+ [7]. NPS+ asks the customer the same questions, but after that adds the customer "why did you choose this answer, can you explain?". This extra question helps to understand the customer's intentions and opinions on the brand better.

• In-app ratings

• Feedback

There are multiple measurements for emotions, some of them are:

• Self-report measures: These can be in the form of a test or a scale. It is easy to initiate but there is a risk of people not being aware of or not being able to identify their emotions.

• Behavioral measures

  • Vocal characteristics: Measurement of pitch is associated with arousal levels. For example anger is associated with a decreasing pitch along with low frequencies of voice.

  • Facial expressions: There are similar facial expressions for emotions. Smiling for happiness, showing teeth for anger etc. These can also be measured cross-culturally as Paul Ekman states.

• Physical measurements

  • Measurements of skin conductance, muscle movement can provide a general view on physical reaction of emotions.

  • Brain imaging techniques can show the active regions at the moment of a feeling of emotion. There are specified brain areas that are active according to the emotion. [8]

Transition of Emotions

Emotions can be experienced solely, but they can also co-exist; there can also be transformations from one emotion to another. They also have interactive relations with people's experiences, meaning they can people's perceptions, decisions etc.

Seeing red

• Sometimes it is not easy to identify an emotion when we are feeling them.

• The overwhelming sensation in our mind and body can make it hard for us to understand which emotion we are feeling.

• There can be an unconscious shift to the angry state from the actual emotion we feel at the time.

• This makes us feel more powerful and in control of the situation.

  • The sense of control helps us in overcoming the overwhelming situation at hand [9].

• It is important to take a deep breath and distinguish our real emotion from the pseudo-emotion that is anger.

Risk perception & decision making

Anger compared to fear, results in lower risk perceptions. This increases the tendency to escalate commitment [10].

Incidental anger have shown to be prominent in blaming other people as responsible [11].

Emotion regulation in teamwork

• Emotion regulation is an important part of controlling our emotions.

• Low levels of emotional regulation are more prone to negative outcomes (decreased performance, increased conflict etc.),

• High levels of emotional regulation tend to perform better and have more positive outcomes (increased job satisfaction, improved teamwork) [12].

Anger and joy in negotiation

• Happiness to anger transitions yielded better outcomes in negotiations, compared to all-time angry states.

• Transiting from happy to angry provided a positive emotional buffer. [13]

Emotion transitions

Emotions are likely to transform into another. There are some higher possibilities for the transitions. Some examples are:

• failure → sad

• satisfied → happy

• pleased → happy

• anger → contempt

• contempt → disgust

• love → satisfaction

• love → gratitude

These transitions are some examples from the transitions that are in higher possibility [14].

Key takeaways in measuring emotions

Measuring emotions is important in every field involving people, including user experience and satisfaction. There are multiple methods to use in order to understand what people feel, some of them are inadequate in understanding (sentiment measurements); and some of them are hard to identify by the person (self-report). A thorough emotion analysis that can understand the person without them explicitly explaining themselves is the best method in understanding the emotion. After measuring the emotion, one should get the gist of transforming emotions. Emotions affect people's decisions, perceptions, and interactions with other people; and when emotions change, they can also change people's behavior.

References

[1] Troth, A. C., Lawrence, S. A., Jordan, P. J., & Ashkanasy, N. M. (2017). Interpersonal emotion regulation in the workplace: a conceptual and operational review and future research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews, 20(2), 523–543. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijmr.12144

[2] Qualitrics. (n.d.) Your ultimate guide to customer experience. What is CX? Ultimate Guide to Customer Experience in 2023

[3] Qualitrics. (n.d.) What is customer emotion? What is Customer Emotion? | Qualtrics

[4] Felbermayr, A., & Nanopoulos, A. (2016). What role do emotions play for brands in online customer reviews? Perspectives in Business Informatics Research 15th International Conference (BIR 2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45321-7_21

[5] Sykora, M., Elayan, S., Hodgkinson, I. R., Jackson, T. W., & West, A. (2022). The power of emotions: leveraging user generated content for customer experience management. Journal of Business Research, 144, 997–1006. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.busres.2022.02.048

[6] Minnich, C. (2022). Customer emotion vs. customer sentiment: differences, tools, and actions. Apptentive. Customer Emotion vs. Customer Sentiment: Differences, Tools, and Actions

[7] Doyle, M. (2022). How to measure customer sentiment (what to do with it). Apptentive. How to Measure Customer Sentiment and Use It | Apptentive

[8] Mauss, I. B., & Robinson, M. D. (2009). Measures of emotion: a review. Cognition and Emotion, 23(2), 209–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930802204677

[9] Pratt, K. (2014, February 3). Psychology tools: what is anger? A secondary emotion. HealthyPysch. Psychology Tools: What is Anger? A Secondary Emotion | HealthyPsych.com

[10] Tsai, M.-H., & Young, M. J. (2010). Anger, fear, and escalation of commitment. Cognition and Emotion, 24, 962–973. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699930903050631

[11] Keltner, D., Ellsworth, P. C., & Edwards, K. (1993). Beyond simple pessimism: Effects of sadness and anger on social perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 740–752. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.64.5.740

[12] Jiang, J. Y., Zhang, X., & Tjosvold, D. (2012). Emotion regulation as a boundary condition of the relationship between team conflict and performance: a multi-level examination. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34(5), 714–734. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1834

[13] Filipowicz, A., Barsade, S., & Melwani, S. (2011). Understanding emotional transitions: the interpersonal consequences of changing emotions in negotiations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(3), 541–556. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023545

[14] Thornton, M. A., & Tamir, D. I. (2017). Mental models accurately predict emotion transitions. PNAS, 114(23), 5982–5987. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1616056114