Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

318 Understanding Emotional Decision Making

as “interrupt mechanisms.”^91 As soon as an audience member perceives a stimulus that has emo-

tional signifi cance to them, the stimulus captures their attention, demands fast comprehension of

its implications, and evokes an emotional response that includes a tendency to take a particular type

of physical action such as embracing, attacking, or withdrawing from the stimulus. The emotional

response interrupts and overrides the more deliberate and rational decision-making process of

making comparisons and trade-offs and leads the audience to make a decision congruent with the

emotion’s action tendency.

Perception of Emotionally Signifi cant Stimuli

Audiences perceive emotionally signifi cant images very rapidly.^92 Although audiences need 240

milliseconds to recognize a neutral picture, they can perceive a negative picture within 105 mil-

liseconds and a positive picture within 180 milliseconds.^93 Even abstract images are perceived more

quickly if an emotion is associated with them.^94

Audiences are especially fast at perceiving emotional facial expressions. Audience responses to

positive versus negative facial expressions are distinguishable within just 80 to 160 milliseconds

after the faces are presented.^95 Even in tasks for which the emotional expression on a face is irrel-

evant, audience members respond to emotional faces more rapidly than neutral ones.^96 Audience

responses to threatening faces are most rapid. Audiences can detect threatening faces faster and

more accurately than friendly faces even when only one facial feature, such as the eyebrows, the

mouth, or the eyes, conveys the threat.^97

Audiences are also quick to perceive emotionally signifi cant words. When presented a series

of words very rapidly, about one every 100 milliseconds, readers are more likely to recognize the

emotionally signifi cant words in a series than the neutral ones.^98

Some audience members can perceive emotionally signifi cant stimuli even when the stimuli

are outside the focus of their attention.^99 In a study of gender differences, men and women

who had been induced to attend to something else overheard syllables spoken either in an

FIGURE 7.1 A Cognitive Process Model of Emotional Decision Making

Continue rational

decision making

No

Yes

Continue rational

decision making

Yes

No

Make decision

that matches

action tendency

1 2 3

Perception Attention

Value

implications

understood?

Value-

relevant

stimulus

recognized?

Emotional

comprehension

Attend to

value-

relevant

stimulus

Generate

action

tendency

Physiological

response

4