Social campaigns, also known as public awareness campaigns, are powerful tools for fostering positive changes in social attitudes. Therefore, they need connection, emotion and resonance.
The goal is to influence collective values rather than promote a specific product (read more about neuromarketing here). Therefore, it’s essential to understand how people’s emotional responses evolve from moment to moment. To do this effectively, FaceReader Online can go beyond surface-level reactions and capture the emotional journey as it unfolds.
Explore the research by Havva Irem Aslan, an Applied Cognitive Psychology student at Utrecht University below. The project analyzes facial expressions to uncover the emotional appeal to positively or negatively framed mental health campaigns.
Designing Emotion-Driven Research: Study Setup
The scope of this project was to explore how different emotional tones in social health campaigns shape people’s nonverbal responses. We selected two emotionally distinct videos:
- One video from Time to Change, titled “Time to Change Reactions,” took a humorous and light-hearted approach to addressing workplace stigma.
- At the same time, the video from the KGH Foundation, titled “We See You,” employed a somber and personal narrative to encourage open conversations about mental health.
Using the seamless survey integration of FaceReader Online with Qualtrics, we recorded participants’ facial expressions while at the same time collecting advanced survey responses. This creates a complete view of emotional responsiveness.
Science-backed Facial Expression Trajectories
One of the strengths of FaceReader Online is its ability to track emotional expressions as they happen. This allows researchers and campaign designers to visualize the emotional journey a viewer experiences throughout a video.
In this study, we focused on three emotions from that are generally classified as basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger. FaceReader Online detected a mix of these expressions across both video conditions. Interestingly, even the (positive) humorous ad triggered moments of sadness or surprise, while the somber ad occasionally elicited happiness. The findings reveal that complex emotional tone fitting to such a sensitive topic.
Importantly, being able to see emotional peaks provides valuable insight into whether the narrative has an emotional impact. These high-response moments can serve as emotional checkpoints. When a message resonates most, people remember the content better and thus this moment is important to consider. This helps campaign creators refine their storytelling for a deeper connection.
Facial Expression Dynamics Over Time
Comparing Responsiveness Across Target Groups
Beyond identifying basic emotions, FaceReader Online also tracks the intensity and frequency of facial activity. This metric is known as responsiveness, which demonstrates the overall expressiveness of a viewer.
Responsiveness helps understand how participants reacted to the campaign videos regardless of the specific emotion displayed. Some individuals exhibited frequent changes in expression, such as smiling, frowning, or showing surprise, while others remained more neutral throughout.
How can responsiveness be used for testing campaigns?
It simplifies your output when you just want an indication of what part of the audience responds to your messaging. In addition, it makes comparing videos with a different tone and audience much easier. In this study you see that the somber video resonated the least with young adults. Females had the strongest reaction to the humorous video.
Audience and Behavioral Insights in Mental Health Campaign Appeal
The persuasiveness of any campaign does not just rely on the emotions. It also depends on how the audience interprets and reacts to various emotional narratives (see this interesting research). To effectively capture the emotional shifts caused by the campaign’s content, it is essential to separate reactions based on motivational outcomes.
After the ads participants could choose to further inform themselves regarding mental health conversations. This further revealed potential differences in how men and women react to these campaigns. Men that were motivated to read more showed higher average happiness. In contrast, the reverse seems to be true for women, where those that were not motivated actually showed slightly higher happiness.
These findings highlight a significant aspect: emotional expressions can convey different behavioral motivations depending on who is experiencing it. For campaign designers and media developers, addressing these emotional and motivational patterns enables better targeted promotion. This makes it both emotionally resonant and behaviorally effective. Want to explore how this would work in practice? Request a trial or get in contact to experience FaceReader Online for yourself.
