Movement

The second persuasive lever is emotion, stirring the audience's feelings.

Some of the power of emotion is simply about grabbing and holding the audience's attention. Keeping them focused long enough to absorb the speaker's message.

But the main power of emotion is the power to move, both inwardly and outwardly. (The idea of 'motion' is baked into the word. The origin is Latin, e + movere, "an outward movement".)

Emotion can drive new behaviour, sometimes pushing through the weight of inertia or routine.
And strong feelings can colour everything an audience thinks or believes.

Emotion is another big topic so we have to be selective about what we cover in this lesson. For that reason:

We won't focus on the specific techniques for stirring emotion in the audience, such as musicality, imagery, story, and surprise.
We won't focus on specific emotions, such as joy, sadness, hope, fear, anger.
We won't focus on positive vs negative emotions.
We won't worry about different intensities of emotion.

You'll see examples of all of these as we go, but none of them are the organising framework for the lesson.

We will look at persuasive emotion through the lens of movement.

We're going to look at how a speaker might use emotion to move an audience towards something or away from something.
Or how a speaker might use emotion to make the audience grow still and stay in one place for a while.
Or how they might use emotion to destabilise the audience and throw them into some kind of confusion.

This framework is just one of many ways you categorise and organise emotions.

You might like to refer to a mood chart

We'll be asking you to notice your own emotional responses to ads and speeches. Since we're not focusing on specific emotions in this lesson, you might find it helpful to refer to an emotion grid or wheel.

One example is this mood grid from Marc Brackett, who is the director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. It's organised on pleasant vs unpleasant and low energy vs high energy.

Mood_Meter_Marc_Brackett_Permission-to-Feel

You might find it interesting to look for patterns in the way these emotions are used throughout the lesson.

(Open PDF version)

Persuasive levers 2: Emotion