“Unit 8: How People Feel”

vocabulary

thalamus-the part of the brain between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain. One of it's functions is to process sensory information and send it to the appropriate part of the cortex.

amygdala- the part of the brain where emotional information is processed it's also where smells go.

nucleus Accubens-a part of the brain that anticipates the pleasurable part of music, in this section of the bran neurotransmitters actually listen to and experience the music.

Attention restoration asserts that people can concentrate better after spending time in nature, or even looking at scenes of nature.

Could not find Western warmth.



Summary of chapter.

In addition to people thinking they also feel. This means you can't just know the audience's demographics you must also understand their psychographics. There are three things that people give off, they are emotions, attitudes, and moods. Emotions are expressed physically through gestures, and facial expressions, they can result from specific events that normally lead to an action. These emotional actions are short reactions do to a situation that normally only last a few minutes. Moods on the other hand last longer they can go on for days and go unnoticed to the general public (they are not always caused by an event). Then you have attitude which is more of a conscious cognitive brain component people can put this on no matter how they are feeling.

All of the emotions, attitude, and moods are shown through our facial expressions  which are universal in every language. The universal emotions are joy, sadness, contempt, fear, disgust, surprise, and anger.  Because this is a universal tool it's a good way to design when you want to reach across to all audiences. So if you decide to design something by using imagery make sure they follow the universal code.


                    Sad                                                   Anger                                                    Disgust

 

                       Fear                                               Joy                    Contempt

 

                           Surprise

The act of emotion goes hand in hand with the actual feelings. You have 40 muscles in your face that are used to create these universal motions. When these muscles become weak or get paralyzed you can not fully express your emotions. This is why celebrities that use a lot of Botox are having a hard time showing emotions. There is also another side effect that happens when you can no longer move you muscles, and that is you can no longer feel the expression, which enables you to really feel that sense.

Anecdotes persuade more than data, information is processed more deeply and remembered longer if it has an emotional pull, so looking for ways to provide a message that will envoke emotions and empathy will be strong and allow the user to remember the experience.

Other things that evoke emotions are smells and memories. The smell of someones perfume, or the sweet aromas of your mom's homemade apple pie can be very strong. Smells, and pictures can bring back memories of these small times in your life.

Memories make people happy, but they are also happier when they are busy. The example that the book used was being in an airport and picking up your luggage. The first scenario was that it took a person 12 minutes to walk and get the luggage and waited a minute for the luggage to actually be received, the second scenario was that it took the person 2 minutes to walk to pick up the luggage and they had to wait around for 11 minutes to receive it. Both the scenarios involve the same amount of time but the second would leave people feeling more agitated because they are sitting around not doing anything. This means that people are happier when they are busy, because they don't notice time going by. People don't like to be idle so they will find things, or excesses to deter from it, these excuses only work however if the person finds the task worthwhile, if they perceive .it to be busywork, then they prefer to stay idle. Try to design something that doesn't make people wait, if you do make sure you have something interesting for them to do while they wait.

People use look and feel as their first indicator on wether they will trust a website or not, there was a study talked about in the book done by Elizabeth Silence on trustworthy websites and these were her findings; 83 percent of people that rejected the websites as not being trustworthy said they did so because of certain design factors; unfavorable look and feel,poor navigation, color, text size, or the name of the website were just a few of them. 73 percent of people said that features relevant when making their decision consisted of the content of the site, rather than the design factors, they liked sites owned by people with a well known reputation and those that had advice written by experts, with information that was specific to them, and that felt were written for people like themselves. Since people are so quick to judge a websiteon wether it is trust worthy or not you need to design with good design factors mentioned above and make your content credible.


The more difficult something is to achieve, the more people like it. If you want people to join your site involve a step by step process that they must complete in order to become a member. making barriers that show that not just any old joe can join like having an application process, meeting certain criteria,or being invited by others can show this.

People feel more positive about an event before or after an event than during it. So when designing with this in mind they will have more of a positive experience if ou can draw out the planning phase. If you measure satisfaction of peoples feeling you will get a better rating if you ask the individual a few day after interacting with the object, or product on the website.