Fast is the Key to Measuring Emotions
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his insight that there are two distinct systems in the brain. One for thinking fast, relying on emotional appraisal, and another for thinking slow, the familiar apparatus of our conscious, rational minds.
As it turns out, many, if not most, of the important decisions we make every day are primarily fueled by the fast, emotional system. AgileBrain makes use of the fast, emotional system, challenging you to react quickly to dozens of stimuli during a short three-minute exercise.
The Time Course of Emotional Perception
AgileBrain is built on a series of neuroscientific findings related to the way the brain processes emotional images (Damasio, 2010; Rudrauf et al, 2008, 2009; Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007; Cunningham, Zelazo, Packer, & Van Bavel, 2007). By using magneto- encephalography – a technique particularly suited to measuring sequences of neural events – these neuroscientists have been able to map out the time course of emotional and cognitive reactions to emotionally evocative visual stimuli. These studies show that from the moment images hit the retina to the point that they elicit activity in the emotion centers of the brain takes under a second.
Looking inside the brain, Rudrauf followed the time course of activity related to emotional and feeling reactions to pleasant or unpleasant visual stimuli. From the moment the stimuli were processed in the visual cortices to the moment the subjects first reported feelings, nearly five hundred milliseconds passed, or about half a second. In ‘brain time’ it is a huge interval, when one thinks that a neuron can fire in five milliseconds. In ‘conscious mind time,’ however, it is not very much. It sits between the couple hundred milliseconds we require to be conscious of a pattern in perception and the seven or eight hundred milliseconds we need to process a concept.
Antonio Damasio, MD; Self Comes to Mind
Countering Cognitive Bias
Rational thought is not always rational. Humans introduce a range of biases to traditional assessment processes that can confound our ability to understand. These include:
- Can’t Say – we don’t have access to our cognitive processes; therefore, we can’t articulate
how we feel about something - Won’t Say! – we don’t want to tell you how we feel about something out of fear of the consequences
- What Say? – we want to tell you what we think you want to hear in order to please
- Say What? – we over-analyze something to the point that we don’t know how we really feel
The problem is that traditional assessments operate in this rational or cognitive space. You are presented with a statement and a scale (e.g., strongly agree to strongly disagree) and are given time to think about your response.
Cue cognitive biases!
We have found that by restricting viewing time to under 2000 milliseconds per image, we were able to access authentic emotional responses before this cognitive filtering can intervene (Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007). As a result, AgileBrai data is largely free of cognitive biases that can arise from rational reflection.