Emotions

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Human Emotions have a real impact on the secure operations of digital ecosystems.

Powerful Emotions

• Fear is an emotion that alerts us to a potential threat or danger, and it makes us want to avoid or escape it. Fear can help us protect ourselves from harm, but it can also limit our opportunities or cause us to overreact.
• Anger is an emotion that arises when we feel wronged, violated, or frustrated, and it makes us want to fight or assert ourselves. Anger can help us defend our rights, values, or interests, but it can also lead to aggression, violence, or resentment.
• Happiness is an emotion that indicates satisfaction, pleasure, or joy, and it makes us want to pursue or maintain it. Happiness can enhance our well-being, health, and relationships, but it can also make us complacent, unrealistic, or insensitive.

Clearly it is fear and anger that stir humans to take action. As a rule negative emotions take precedence over positive ones.

An international team of researchers led by Stony Brook University's Mason Youngblood found a negativity bias caused a surge of voter-fraud conspiracy theories on Twitter (now X) during the 2020 presidential election. The researchers modeled about 350,000 actual Twitter users' behaviors and correlated the sharing patterns of roughly 4 million voter fraud-related tweets with people more likely to retweet social posts containing stronger negative emotion. They learned these results align with previous research suggesting social media gives emotionally negative content an edge across diverse domains. Youngblood said the study’s result “has important implications for current debates on how to counter the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation on social media.”

However, the average duration of an emotion in the human brain is 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds, you can watch the emotion happening, feel it in your body, and then watch it go away. But we may prolong our emotions by thinking about them or trying to suppress them.

Emotional Design

Designers of computer experiences can use emotions and their duration to influence choices that users make on the web. For example, they can:

• Use emotional design to create positive user experiences that increase user engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.
• Use different types of emotions to appeal to different cognitive levels of users: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.
• Use aesthetic factors such as color, shape, texture, and sound to evoke visceral reactions and first impressions.
• Use functional factors such as usability, performance, and feedback to evoke behavioral reactions and satisfaction.
• Use symbolic factors such as branding, meaning, and value to evoke reflective reactions and emotional bonds.
• Use negative emotions such as fear, anger, or sadness to create contrast, urgency, or empathy.
• Use positive emotions such as joy, surprise, or curiosity to create delight, interest, or motivation.
• Use the 90-second rule to design for emotional peaks and endings that users will remember and share.

Emotional design is a powerful tool that can help designers create more engaging and persuasive web experiences. However, it should also be used ethically and responsibly, with respect for the users’ needs, preferences, and feelings.