Lunch Talk: Tools for Entrepreneurs - Making Something People Love

Renowned entrepreneur and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, will inspire you to think of unique ways to connect with your customers, and to build a community of users who want your business to succeed. In this class you'll learn some key branding, marketing, and user experience principles, plus specific tactics and strategies that you can use to create a company people love.



Note emotional vs cognitive appeal of a new product/service in a new market.

tags: lunchtalk, innovation, entrepreneurship, internet, web, creativity, emotion

Lab Notebook: Emotions, Metaphors, and Creativity.

When people talk about their emotions they often use metaphors because it is difficult to express how you feel in words. In everyday life we solve this language problem by using common experiences with objects as metaphors. In the 1980s, UC Berkeley psychologists Lakoff and Kovecses studied the connection between emotions and metaphors. The metaphor of a fluid in a container (hot, cold, boiling, flowing etc.) turned out to be associated with all major emotions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, love, lust, pride, shame, and others. We are so used to dealing with water and other liquids that when something unknown and unfamiliar is presented as "water" it becomes easily accessible to our minds.

Here's a great example how a difficult concept can be explained to a lay audience: Robert Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, shows the work of his new incredible electronic device as water flowing over the dam. In the picture, charged elements (electrons and holes) become "water," while the electro-magnetic field that controls the flow of the current is shown as a dam barrier that can be raised or lowered to control the flow of "water."

Remarkably, the metaphors of UP and DOWN are also frequently used to describe emotions, e.g. "I feel a bit down today," or "Lighten up!".

Max and I should try to use the common metaphors discovered by Lackoff and Koveses to explain how our system model works. In Scalable Innovation (Chapter 3) I use "train" to explain a difficult patent, but water would probably work even better.

tags: creativity, psychology, emotion, system

Emotion and perception: brighten up!

A study published in 2012 by Yale cognitive scientists (Song, H., et al, 2012) shows that people perceive smiling faces as being brighter than frowning ones. The paper also mentions a field of research that investigates psychological truths behind common metaphors,

For instance, immoral or guilty feelings increase the perception that one is physically dirty (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006), a sad mood biases people's visual attention in the vertical plane (Meier & Robinson, 2006), and feelings of loneliness are experienced as physical coldness (Bargh & Shalev, in press).

So, if you feel cold, dirty, and see mostly vertical lines it might be the right time to smile.

tags: psychology, biology, control, emotion, science

BMW: to Russia with Love.

BMW takes a page from Steve Jobs' ad manual in it's latest web campaign in Russia. In 2010, selling the iPad as Magical, Beautiful, Amazing, Steve Jobs started focusing on emotional response rather than technical features of a hi-tech product. In 2012, BMW sells its car claiming (in Russian) "We Invent Emotions."

In short, ad campaigns hack into human brains, presenting consumer goods as live objects that feel right. We no longer talk about features and benefits. It's all about feelings. 

tags: social, emotion, psychology, advertisement, distribution, control

Lunch Talk: BBC - The Human Mind (Part 2).

The second part of The Human Mind, a BBC documentary about the brain. The focus of this part is human personality.

link

tags: lunchtalk, emotion, biology, brain

Lunch Talk: (@TED) Music and emotion.

In this epic overview, Michael Tilson Thomas traces the development of classical music through the development of written notation, the record, and the re-mix.

tags: entertainment, history, psychology, emotion, lunchtalk

All you need is love!

Feb 14, 2012. NS -- ...falling in love also appears to buffer people from negative emotions. They showed 55 new lovers and 57 single people six video clips, including two selected to trigger positive emotions and two that would trigger negative emotions. Electrodes were used to monitor the volunteers for signs of stress.

While single people showed signs of stress when watching the negative films, new lovers seemed to be unaffected by them (Emotion, DOI: 10.1037/a0024090).

To improve the economy, or at least how people feel about it, the government should have sponsored massive love fests and invested in dating services. Also, sponsoring Twitter love bots and Facebook "heart" apps would help to relieve the pain of unemployment among young people.

tags: problem, solution, effect, social, emotion, psychology

Lunch talk: The opportunity of adversity.

The thesaurus might equate "disabled" with synonyms like "useless" and "mutilated," but ground-breaking runner Aimee Mullins is out to redefine the word. Defying these associations, she hows how adversity -- in her case, being born without shinbones -- actually opens the door for human potential.

tags: emotion, lunchtalk

East vs West: twitting [un]happiness

tags: emotion, source, map, 10x, psychology, process

A [future] lie detector.

How to spot a lie that hasn't happened yet? Just ask Thomas Baumgartner and his colleagues from the University of Zurich in Switzerland:

The fMRI data revealed that certain brain areas became more active when trustees were breaking a promise. These regions – the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala – are known to be involved in emotion. They could reveal an emotional conflict in a person who knows they are doing something wrong, or feels guilty, says Baumgartner.

NS duly notices that in order not to harm innocent liars bystanders this new research has to be applied with caution.

tags: psychology, brain, mind, health, social,  emotion

Four hugs a day keep the psychatrist away.

The latest research on communicating emotions by touch (click on pictures to enlarge) shows, e.g. that a handshake is probably the best way to "say" thank you. Also, there's significant difference between how effective men and women are in communicating their core feelings: anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, sympathy, happiness, and sadness. 

Source: Hertenstein, M. J., Holmes, R., McCullough, M., & Keltner, D. (2009). The communication of emotion via touch. Emotion, 9, 566-573. doi: 10.1037/a0016108

tags:  psychology, health, communication, emotion,

Philips has found a way to connect a medical device with a life-style application:

...a biometric-style emotion-sensing system that supposedly alerts traders when it might be wise to take a breath and step away from the Charles Schwab site.

The Rationalizer system consists of the EmoBracelet and corresponding EmoBowl. The bracelet measures the user's emotional arousal level through a skin response sensor and displays the findings as a dynamic light pattern on either the bracelet itself or the nearby, rather cool-looking bowl. As your emotions intensify, so does the light pattern, which speeds up and shifts color from soft yellow to orange to deep red--alerting you and everyone else who pops in the room that you're turning into a basket case.

tags: innovation, emotion, health, control, detection,

related: US Patent Application 20090226046

Why emotions are contageous.

From Descarte's Baby, p. 115

This could be another human brain reaction that might be broken in a sci-fi context. What if we could control mirror neurons to process information before it is acted upon. One could argue that our emotional system developed long time ago when instant action was critical for survival. Today, it might be a maladaptation that leads to stock bubbles, copycat killings, etc.

Also relates to Neurologger research and this laughing babies video:

A new concept from Philips Design
http://www.design.philips.com/probes/projects/tattoo/index.page

The Electronics Tattoo film expresses the visual power of sensitive technology applied to the human body. The film subtly leads the viewer through the simultaneous emotional and aesthetic transformations between two lovers.

via http://centralasian.vox.com

This effect would look really cool in movies, stills, and live picture frames.