Understanding Emotions

I recently read a primer on understanding emotions, with an eye toward how to leverage them in customer experience.   There's nothing sinister or underhanded on my agenda - but it does seem to me that much of what we do in designing and delivering experiences is geared toward avoiding unhappiness by removing barriers to success and there's very little knowledge of what can be done to promote happiness in a proactive manner.

I don't think I found a solution - but the study of this topic has given me food for thought: mainly, that the default setting for human emotions is a neutral state called "contentedness" in which individuals are neither happy nor unhappy, but quite indifferent to external stimuli in general, being neither elated nor distressed at the goings on in their external surroundings and internal ruminations.

Motivation to act arises when there is an immediate stimulus that causes a change in the contented state.   Pain and discomfort motivate a person to action, whereas pleasure causes them to remain inert and savor the experience while it lasts.   More significant to motivation is the perceived potential for something to interrupt the contented state: the prospect of being subject to pain or the opportunity to experience pleasure prompt an individual to take preventative or proactive measures to avoid one and seize the other.

It is likely significant that both immediate and potential pain is motivational, whereas only potential pleasure is motivational.   Though it can be argued that an individual who is presently experiencing pleasure would be motivated to take action to prolong the experience and forefend against the potential that it will be interrupted or diminished.   I don't have the sense that sustaining pleasure can be entirely equated to avoiding pain, but my sense of now is that they are likely analogous in many ways.

It is also likely significant that emotional reaction (or pre-action) is regarded as being motivational - it provides an inclination to take action but does not govern action itself.   It's generally accepted that emotion hands off to reason when a desire is discovered, such that an emotional reaction causes a person to want to take action whereas reason guides a person in choosing the action to take.

This would seem to indicate that emotion precedes action, such that by the time a customer visits a store or a website, the emotional influence has played its part and the individual is likely now following a course dictated by logic.   And while there has been some consideration of sustaining emotion throughout a sequence of actions, my sense is now that it may be a bit misguided.

More aptly, the emotions an individual experiences while pursuing a course of action are different to those that prompted them to undertake the action in the first place.   These emotions are not reactions to the original stimulus, but to the progress that is being made toward the goal.

That is to say that the emotions experienced while acting are those of engagement and anticipation of an outcome, rather than sustaining the emotion that caused the action to be undertaken - that moment has passed, and the emotion of that moment along with it.

As such a person who is motivated by a sense of discomfort to take action to diminish or terminate those emotions then experiences a different set of emotions as they progress toward their intended goal - they are no longer upset because of the initial discomfort, but anxious about achieving an escape from panic, and that anxiety can express itself as hope or despair that the outcome will be achieved.

This might help to better understand the reason customers ultimately decide not to make a purchase: their engagement in the shopping process, with the anxiety it entails, may distract them from whatever emotional state motivated them to begin shopping in the first place - and if they are significantly distracted by the process, it is no longer necessary to make a purchase to escape the motivational state because the act of pursuit has involved stimuli, the reaction to which as replaced the motivational state with different emotions.

Aside of that, there is the notion of happiness as an ephemeral state - which sheds some light on consumerism and materialism.   In effect, success at a goal that delivers a sustained sensation of pleasure resets the parameters for the contented state.   Gaining something that was acutely desired satisfies desire and conveys a sense of accomplishment, but when "normal" becomes a state in which the desire is satisfied, the subject returns to mere contentment.

Even so, I'm not discouraged in my search for an answer, though I'm beginning to understand that, given the way in which emotions are currently understood, a solution may be difficult to identify.