This may seem like a strange topic, but bear with me. Here is an article detailing how some scientists decided to take the time to run everyone’s favorite smiling lady through an emotion recognition program in order to decode her famously mysterious expression. Their result: 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry.

Uh huh…

This reminded me very much of an experiment mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink - an experiment in which researchers would watch conversations between couples and rate them numerically, second by second, according to a continuum of various emotions.

Put aside my issue with trying to make great art fit into some scientific construct and just think about the problem with both of these examples as expressed by the Mona Lisa article: “Still, scientists will probably never know what made her feel the way she did.”

All together now: DUH!

Human emotions just plain aren’t quantifiable. That’s why, when researching for an identity project, we put so much effort into different methods of meaningful, qualitative research. It’s terribly easy to determine that 4 out of 5 dentists prefer X, or that 72% of consumers believe Y. But “In a qualitative world, there is no single, determinable truth. Instead, there are truths to be found, and these truths are bound by the time, the context, and the individuals who believe them.” - Using Qualitative Research in Advertising

It may be comforting to assign numbers to every piece of human and emotional experience, but the wonderful (and often incredibly frustrating) fact is that most of behavior - including brand attachment - is irrational, so while research needs to respect the “83% happy” pieces of data, it really needs to embrace the underlying motivations and engage the irrational emotional centers.

Heck, maybe that’s what she’s smiling about.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2005 at 11:58 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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