Latest News

THE JANUS FACE OF LANGUAGE: Where are the emotions in words and the words in emotions?

16 May 2018

Dr. Walla and other contributing authors contributed 24 articles which are compiled into 4 chapters. These articles highlight how language and emotions work together. "They provide answers to how information about an emotion is decoded from abstract stimuli such as words, and how the emotional content of a word is represented in the brain. They furthermore highlight the role bodily physiological changes and self- and socially relevant contexts play in the processing and generation of emotional word meaning."
Frontiers in Psychology

Special Issue for Administrative Sciences

27 Feb 2018

Peter Walla will guest edit a special issue on Consumer Behavior and Consumer Neuroscience for the scientific peer-review journal "Administrative Sciences". The special issue is planned to focus on discrepancies between self-reported and objectively measured data. There is growing evidence that such discrepancies exist and given that human behavior is strongly guided by non-conscious information processing it is considered beneficial to get access to this non-conscious processing level by collecting implicit data through objective technology.

How to define emotion?

09 Oct 2017

Peter Walla got an innovative article accepted for publication. This article clearly distinguishes between emotion, feeling and affective processing by offering clear definitions. Numerous prior attempts to agree on only an emotion definition alone have failed. A further still widely neglected problem is that language as a cognitive cortical function has no access to subcortical affective processing, which forms the basis for both feelings and emotions. Thus, any survey question about something emotional cannot be answered properly. This is why it is particularly important to complement self-report data with objective measures whenever emotion-related processes are of interest.

more news...

An unbiased measure of customer likes and dislikes

: : Applied Neuroscience : :

A new technology to eliminate bias and discover a person's true thoughts and feelings

Measures that are based on demanded explicit responses - like those utilising questionnaires - tend to be biased and as a consequence, result in responses that do not reflect the truth, but what an individual thinks you want to hear.

For example, imagine you are invited to dinner and you do not like the food. When asked if you liked it, you are unlikely to be truthful and say it tasted awful. Consequently, you may be invited again and have the host cook the same meal especially for you. These types of responses are commonly given in questionnaires and other structured research techniques, leading you to draw incorrect conclusions from the research.
In a business environment, the consequences of making a poor decision based on biased market research may cost your company money, time and opportunities. Application of this new technology can help your organisation make better decisions. The technology can be applied to:
  • Goods
  • Services
  • Campaigns
Our technology can provide you with an unbiased measure of consumer like or dislike. Your organisation will have market research more accurate than that provided by any questionnaire. Having access to this unbiased information will give your organisation an edge over your competitors. You will save money and strengthen customer loyalty.


The neurobiology of affective processing: Important knowledge for decision making in business and economy

Imagine you are a primitive creature exploring the world. You would be exposed to new and unknown environments with every single step you make. Assuming that life is all about survival what would be more important, to name and know what you see or to have an idea whether it can be approached or should rather be avoided? Obviously, for pure survival it's more important to have a system that detects potential danger and is also able to define stimuli in the environment as appetitive than to know what they actually are.

Being the primitive creature that you pretend to be, you don't even have the cognitive capacity to name anything. What evolution though provided you with is affective information processing designed to detect potentially harmful and appetitive sources in an ever changing environment. This was the very beginning of decision making to guide and adapt behaviour.

After the origin of affective processing, evolution provided organisms with cognitive processing capacities which finally allowed language to come into existence. Because affective processing occurred before cognitive development it evolved independent from language. Affective information was never meant to be put into words. Only semantic information, the very basis for cognition, is designed to be verbalised.

Dozens of millions of years later, being a human being you do have cognitive capacity and you are able to use words to verbalise even affective information, but due to its non-cognitive nature words may terribly fail to describe it. And even worse, words can easily be used to intentionally misinform others about your affective inner world.

Translated into the modern world of market research this means that using a questionnaire to get some information about the likes or dislikes related to brands, services and products results in biased responses. Biased as a result of wrong introspection or biased as a result of intentional misinformation. Who does not tend to state being reliable, social, honest and trustworthy when asked while knowing that nothing is lost if all is simply made up?

The solution to that problem is to utilise objective measures of affective information processing that do not rely on self report. We test the affective component of your solution with technologies that provide you with invaluable insight that will allow you to secure your customers loyalty and thus put you at the front in the market place.

Neuroconsult has the know-how and the experience in this field.
The brain knows more than it admits and we have access to that knowledge