How can two factor theory of emotion help your business?
“The Schachter–Singer theory, or two-factor theory of emotion, states that emotion is based on two factors: physiological arousal and cognitive label.”
Two Factor Theory of Emotion
In other words, when a person feels an increase in bodily response like heart beat, temperature, butterflies in the stomach or goosebumps, the brain instantly looks for emotional cues in the environment to rationalize the cause of the physical response. In reality, the physiological arousal is either caused by a change in inner motivation or the stimulation of the senses. Sometimes we are out of words to describe the emotion we are feeling. That’s when we can’t find emotional cues in the immediate environment. Other times we know we are supposed to be feeling an emotion like regret when our earlier actions lead to unwanted consequences but we are not feeling it. In this case, the cognitive label is present but no physiological arousal is happening.
Physical response to different emotions
In 2013, a team of scientists from Finland consistently found that each emotion are caused by arousal in different parts of the body (the picture above). According to the findings, it seems that depression and happiness are opposite to each other. The depression turn our bodies cold while happiness activate the entire body. Our acute ability to sense the inner body like the organs and the circulatory system fuel the activity of emotions. This evidence further confirms the validity of the two factor theory of emotion. Since the physiological responses of love, pride, happiness and anger for example are quite similar, so the brain uses cognitive labelling to identify them as distinct emotions.
The star map of different human emotions
There is another phenomenon in the two factor theory of emotion that is worth investigating. When we watch horror movies for example, we feel a strong emotion of fear due to the background sound design but we believe that the fear comes from the scary face of the zombie. In this instance, we have mislabeled the cause of the physiological arousal. In everyday life the misattribution of emotions are fairly common. Therefore, you can use this fact in your favor. When you design a joyful sensory experience for your customer, put your product logo in his visual range so he mis-attributes the cause of his joy to your product. Be very subtle in this approach. If the process is repeated over a long span of time, he will eventually associate positive emotions to your brand and will become loyal to your product.