Arjun Chaudhuri - Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior

Department of Communication Sciences and Psychology Uni v ersity of Connecticut, Storrs

Emotion and Reason in Consumer Beha v ior is a pioneering book, among the first if not the first to apply systematic emotion theory and measure ment techniques to the analysis of consumer behavior. I am confident that it will not be the last. Emotion was long a difficult notion in the social and behavioral sciences because of the perceived difficulty of measuring one of its core components: subjective experience. Behaviorists almost entirely eschewed the concept of emotion because it appeared to be impossible to objectively measure and verify subjective experiences because they appear essentially to be private events. B. F. Skinner (1953) acknowledged that private events may be distinguished by limited accessibility but not, so far as we know, by any special structure or nature (p. 257). Presciently, Skinner also noted, the line between public and private is not fixed. The boundary shifts with every discovery of a technique for making private events public.... The problem of privacy may, therefore, eventually be solved by technical advances (p. 282). With the coming of the cognitive revolution, emotions came to be seen as disturbances that occur when cog nitive processing is disrupted (Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960; Simon, 1967). However, subjective experience per se was seen as private and unobservable, and self-report measures of emotional experience were sus pect because they could not be objectively confirmed.

When the study of emotion began to gain scientific respectability beginning in the late 1960s, it was its objectively observable display and

FOREWORD

communicative aspects rather than its experiential aspects that were emphasized. An important sign of this rebirth was the work of Paul Ekman, E. R. Sorenson, and Wallace Friesen, published in Science (1969), which demonstrated that the posed facial expressions of Westerners can accurately be interpreted by isolated Fore tribespeople in highland New Guinea, and that the Fores expressions could be interpreted by Americans. Similarly, the work of Robert E. Miller showed that normal rhesus monkeys can demonstrate accurate spontaneous emotional com munication, which can, however, be disrupted by such factors as early iso lation and certain psychoactive drugs (Miller, Caul, & Mirsky, 1967).

The Developmental-Interactionist theory of emotion stemmed from my work with Miller, applying his techniques for measuring spontaneous emotional communication to human beings (Buck, 1976, 1984). The theory viewed affect and reason as interacting in a developmental context. It saw emotion as an aspect of a filter that responds quickly to events prior to complex information processing, and indeed emotion was seen to alter and guide higher-order processing. This kind of conceptualization received important support in the work of Joseph LeDoux (1996), who demon strated that the brain responds to affective events in two ways: with a fast but relatively undifferentiated low road system involving emotion mech anisms in the subcortical and old-cortical parts of the brain, and with a slower but more differentiated high road involving new-cortical mecha nisms. The low road information functions to quickly command atten tion and physiological arousal, and to stimulate reflexive action; the high road modulates the low road reaction and initiates goal-oriented coping behaviors. So, when you are startled by your playful roommate, the initial low road emotional response is quickly followed by relief that it is just your roommate playing a trick.

Recent studies have used technical advances that actually do give a measure of accessibility to otherwise private events as Skinner (1953) had suggested. This includes functional magnetic resonance imagingthe fMRIthat by mapping blood flow determines which parts of the brain are activated. For example, Arthur Aron, Helen Fisher, Lucy Brown, and colleagues (2005) recently showed that pictures of a loved one shown to persons in a state of acute romantic love activate subcortical reward areas including the right ventral tegmental area and dorsal caudate. Importantly, Aron stated in a June 2005 press release that the strong relationships demonstrated in this research between self-reported romantic love and specific brain activity dramatically increase our confidence that self-report questionnaires can actually measure brain activity. Another recent study illustrates that basic neurochemicals can induce complex behavior patterns in human beings. Kosfeld et al. (2005) showed that the simple administration of the neurohormone oxytocinlinked to nurturance in animalsincreases the trust that people have in strangers.