Meet Willow, she’s going to be helping me with various psychological projects over the coming months.

You may recall a previous article where I reviewed a study that looked at how the hormone released when we see an image like that of a puppy (oxytocin) had been shown to increase donations in response to adverts for good causes (here’s a link), and people reported empathising more with the focus of the ad they had seen.

This is a case of misattribution: we experience an ‘instinctive’ reaction in our unconscious mind, and misdirect the resulting feeling to something else we encounter around the same time.

Of course, you can’t go around squirting hormones up people’s noses, but you can surround your product with oxytocin-inducing imagery (Willow is available for photo shoots, but growing very quickly).

Whipping out a picture of a puppy isn’t necessarily that easy either. But there are lots of other ways to connect to people emotionally and benefit from that emotional trigger by being around at the same time as emotional associations are activated.

Take touching someone for instance. Touching someone (appropriately that is, I’m talking about making gentle contact with their forearm not the sort of thing that leads to high profile court cases, but in a way that is generally considered acceptable in the prevailing culture) has been shown to generate all manner of positive outcomes:

• Waiters and waitresses have been shown to receive higher tips.
• People seeking names for petitions have obtained much higher success rates.
• People seeking help from strangers are more likely to get it.
• Favourability ratings can be increased.

Recently a fascinating study was conducted to explore further what’s going on when someone is touched. In my view it goes a long way to explain the underlying mental processes that are taking place.

Is this the by-product of some ESP-like interpersonal connection between humans? Do some people have ‘the touch’ and others not?

Researchers exposed a group of female participants to neutral and negative images and used an EEG to measure electrical activity in the brain, looking for evidence that one form of brain activity (know as the late positive component) that is believed to be associated with evaluative mental processes.

Sure enough, they found enhanced activity when a touch was applied. But what was particularly telling was that it didn’t matter whether that touch came from a female friend or a mechanical device!

So it seems that the feeling (of being touched) activates the neural paths to our feelings more generally. As a result we’re more likely to feel something about what we encounter around the same time, even if it has nothing to do with the touch we have received.

I suspect that the same effect occurs in advertising. Exposed to something emotive, like a puppy, or a beautiful woman on a tropical beach, paths to our feelings are opened, ready and waiting for the next item (the advertised product) to be ‘reacted to’. We may still hate it, but the initial scene has, in all likelihood, tipped the odds in favour of a positive reaction.

And it probably doesn’t matter if that seen isn’t particularly relevant to the product itself; its role is to activate our emotional zones.

So hopefully Willow’s participation means you will have enjoyed this article a whole lot more than might otherwise be the case!

Source: Schirmer, A., Teh, K., Wang, S., Vijayakumar, R., Ching, A., Nithianantham, D., Escoffier, N., and Cheok, A. (2011). Squeeze me, but don’t tease me: Human and mechanical touch enhance visual attention and emotion discrimination. Social Neuroscience, 6 (3), 219-230 DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2010.507958