How Emotions Shape Our World.

Are we engaging in honest, compassionate communication when we talk to people about their health, or just spewing data? More importantly, are we listening?

If you go far enough out into space, the Earth looks like little more than a pale blue dot. Astronomer Carl Sagan said the following about such a picture of Earth, taken by Voyager spacecraft, in an excerpt from a 1996 commencement address.

That's home. On it...every hunter and forager...every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every...mother and father, every inventor and explorer...every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. Think of the rivers of blood spilled [to] become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

The delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe [is] challenged by this point of pale light... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

From this perspective, it’s hard, at first, to think that anything we do matters. Fortunately we have emotions. Seemingly at war with the cold logic of space, the color of emotion paints our world as far bigger than a mere dot. Logic assembles our experience as data and facts. Emotions, however, spin facts into stories.

Telling ourselves these stories we define realities that challenge meaninglessness. These are the realities of family, lovers, and friends. Our emotions expand the significance of these circles to become worlds in themselves.

Health care: world of confusion

Are we pushing out data or addressing people's emotions when we talk to them about health?

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How Emotions Shape Our World. (2)

Are we using data or are we engaging in honest, compassionate communication when we talk to people about their health? More importantly, are we listening? In strong language, a June, 2008 McKinsey Quarterly article, What Consumers Want in Health Care, lays out pretty clearly just how "confused, concerned, and unprepared" people are in the face of not just addressing, but paying for, their own health care.

The new Star Trek movie is largely about world-sized emotions. Emotions add vital texture to the story, bringing weight to Zachary Quinto’s portrayal of young Spock as a sullen if not smoldering Vulcan.






Spock beaming down to Vulcan to save his mom.
Paramount Pictures, 2009

We learn that Vulcans feel things deeply, but have an austere system of logic to control these feelings. They share ancestry with the Romulans, who shrug off any restrictions on emotionality. Nero (Eric Bana) spends decades lurking in a vast, black, nightmarish ship with squid-like tentacles reaching into the darkness, seeking revenge against perceived wrongs.

As health consumers we are feeling hopeless and afraid, lacking the knowledge we need to navigate a vast and confusing universe. When nobody listens to our anger and fear, they likewise grow to become black and all-encompassing.

Science fiction sets up a helpful metaphor for considering a less logical and more emotional way of communicating with people feeling lost and afraid. Actual science, social science in this case, reveals even more.

Anthropology offers insights from our ancient past

What's the most effective way to communicate with someone in this groundless state? Reason with them logically, or acknowledge their emotions?

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How Emotions Shape Our World. (3)

Anthropology offers insights from our ancient past

What's the most effective way to communicate with someone feeling lost, hopeless, and afraid? Reason with them logically, or acknowledge their emotions?

Of all places, there's an answer to that question in an article called, How to Solve Toddler Tantrums: Think Like a Neanderthal by anthropologist Meredith Small. The parallel observations she makes regarding human adults in an article about, of all things, two-year-olds, were more useful and profound than much of what's written on social marketing or public health.

Small cites the theories of pediatrician Harvey Karp, who suggests toddlers are driven by instinct and emotion more so than reason. Specifically, seeing toddlers under the lens of human development, children are like our distant ancestors, the Neanderthals.

Karp suggests speaking in succinct phrases that acknowledge the toddler’s feelings ("You are angry") rather than in analytical, Homo Sapiens terms (“Axel, Fuddruckers simply isn't the place for civilized people to carry on in this way") avoids infuriating them further. They only want to know they are heard, and that their emotions are valid.

Neanderthals were no dummies. Their brains were bigger than Homo Sapiens' and most likely capable of sophisticated logic, but history worked against them. They had not yet developed the tools of language.

[Karp's] advice is better couched in the notion that Homo sapiens, and presumably our ancestors, were designed to feel very deeply, and little kids simply want their emotions acknowledged, just like adults. In fact, adults spend millions of dollars each year to talk to counselors and get their feelings heard.

I was immediately struck, upon reading that, by how frequently health care messages are posed to patients and consumers in a Homo Sapiens kind of way. Because health care is treated as a “technical” subject — involving the application of tools to fix symptoms in the machine of the human body — messages hinge around technical imagery couched in slightly pedantic, analytical language, which Karp suggests infuriates the Neanderthal brain.

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How Emotions Shape Our World. (4)

Clubbing us over the head: excerpts from actual campaigns

Here are excerpts from actual ad campaigns that might infuriate or fall flat with me if, in becoming a confused consumer, I am retreating into my Neanderthal sensibility.

Insurance company

This out-of-home campaign features not only pictures of an insurance card, but the torn-out excerpt of a Summary Plan of Benefits, replete with linear, Vulcan phraseology. This provider also prominently featured the word "colonoscopy" in recent ads appearing on buses and bus shelters. This campaign emphasizes bureaucratic process and procedure, with a little scary, technical terminology thrown in for good measure.

Hospital system

On billboards, this hospital system makes strides by showing human faces, but the faces of stock photo models — not mine, nor those I could interpret as being my family’s, and mostly Caucasian I might add — with technical terms like “surgeon” and “cardiac center” floating above. Showing people is good, but consumers can easily sniff out and disregard what is too obviously stock art. And again, we can't seem to get away from technical terms that focus on the scary procedure instead of on the positive, human outcome.

HMO

This one shows a folksy, retro-inspired illustration of a dirty hand, and tells me to wash mine. This is part of a campaign whose launch featured giant, anthropomorphic specimen cups and syringes. The effort to use unique design — albeit representing the same, overtly medical subjects — is laudable in a market flooded with its opposite. It's a step forward. Somehow, the message went in the opposite direction, seeming paternalistic and slightly demeaning.

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How Emotions Shape Our World. (5)

The McKinsey Quarterly says, “Consumers are confused, concerned, and uncertain about their health insurance and financing needs. Companies should listen to them.”

This confusion and concern extends from health care financing to health itself. I’m scared and confused by my symptoms. Won’t somebody listen to me?

The camera pulls back again to the pale blue dot, that mote of dust suspended in the sunbeam. In the vast cosmic plane, where our shouts could echo on forever, or land with another person, forming interlacing connections that give solid shape to the emptiness, it’s the presence of some listener that makes a universe of difference.

Listen to me! The first tools (provided by the influence of weird, unexplained monoliths) serve not to build shelters or get food but express existential rage in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 1968

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A quick look at what good looks like.

What A.L. has said so far.
A summary argument for better health care creative

1.
Mostly, Americans have done the best with what they have.

2.
Busy (and broke) as some of us are, much of what we have is cheap, convenient, and
comforting.

3.
Can you blame us? Apparently, yes. Much of public- and consumer-health messaging pushes individual accountability in pedantic tones, telling us to "do" or "not do" things it defines as "healthy."

4.
In fact, eating, drinking, and smoking are exactly what American society and our economy tells us to do. We're encouraged to be consumers. So we consume.

5.
Landmark research suggests a better approach. Better than merely blaming us for our own bad habits, public health messaging can reveal the ways food and consumer product manufacturers haven't always given us healthy choices...

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A quick look at what good looks like. (2)

6.
....For example, foods are loaded with super-simple carbohydrates, nasty oils, coloring. These additives manipulate our bodies' powerful abilities to use flavor/cravings as indicators for foods we need. Granted, we're adults. We can take some responsibility for overlooking these ingredients, often found, however, in cheap, quick foods that satisfy a real need for the cash-strapped. But, what about kids?

Are kids' bodies being programmed for a taste for fake food? Is it harder and harder for stressed-out parents to battle the onslaught of messaging, not just for junk food, but junk recreation, that encourages kids to sit idly in front of TV, PC, and Wii screens?

Messaging that unites us in a shared motivation to counter the ploys of manufacturers creates a grass roots movement. Grass roots movements influence markets as well as policy. Ultimately, research suggests, they drive widespread change by getting us to think socially and politically as well as individually.

Social media are channels we can explore to take a socially-driven approach to moving society forward.

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A quick look at what good looks like. (3)

7.
As much as we can think about people in groups, there's still great value in thinking about them as individuals. This is a time-tested strategy for effective advertising. Advertising has changed. It's become more about listening-to than telling. Let's listen to the genuine fear and confusion people are experiencing about health care. Anthropologist Meredith Small says people are emotional beings. Appeals to rationality may infuriate or fall flat withconsumers. Health-care-speak is an example. McKinsey Quarterly says we should listen to and reassure them.

8.
Examples from high-profile health campaigns (see "Clubbing us over the head...") show us
what not-so-good looks like.

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A quick look at what good looks like. (4)

9.
What good might look like:

• Tell stories using humor, metaphors, and images, restating health care in a form that speaks to consumers' psyche as advertisees rather than propagandees. The latter is more easily tuned out.
• Show you're listening and offer reassurance.
• Employ social media, with a plan. Find the places where people naturally assemble to talk about health stuff, where you can listen to their fears and questions and provide answers ---- answers they'll pass on, rather than being force-fed information that stops there.
• Use content and editorial. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Digg are transforming our tastes. We want news. We're looking for "updates," personal updates from people we know as well as from the world at large.

All of these ideas are founded in the same climate that has spawned social media. Social media help marketers, of which health care leadership is one example, build relationships in the same way we build relationships with each other. We remove blame and recognize each other's emotions. We can recognize that people essentially do the best with what they have. We can give them more.

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