Images are More Powerful than Words
Henrik Ibsen said, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” When it comes to measuring emotions, it turns out that pictures are priceless. Images are the best tool for recognizing and expressing emotions and they avoid all the problems of written language (translation, response style, etc.).
AgileBrain uses images rather than words, and those images have been rigorously mapped and validated to correspond to specific emotional needs.
Images Evoke Meaning More Efficiently Than Words
AgileBrain uses images to overcome the limitations of measuring human emotions with traditional survey (cognitive) approaches. These limitations are explored in more detail on the following page, but the fundamental insight from neuroscience in this area is that too much time shifts processing from the fast, emotional system to the slower, deliberative (cognitive) system. Put another way, we should measure emotions emotionally, not cognitively.
We also know from neuroscience that the brain process visual information much faster and ore efficiently than text. For this reason, we chose images as the medium to measure emotions. We have developed and validated a battery of images that represent the full range of human emotions. The images below are representative of that battery and arrayed in the 12 cell (the 4 domains of life times the 3 levels of experience equals 12 emotional need areas) AgileBrain framework. The images below are representative of the types used:
Representative Images (Positive)
The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen (ironically, a realist), understood the emotional power of images when he said, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” A century later, neuroscience explained the power of images that Ibsen was talking about:
How are emotions triggered? Quite simply, by images of objects or events that are actually happening at the moment or that, having happened in the past, are now being recalled. –Antonio Damasio, MD; Self Comes to Mind