The Missing Link: A breakthrough to extracting emotional drivers of behaviour

Brian Fine and Con Menictas

This paper presents a new approach to capturing respondents' emotional drivers of behaviour through research involving free form text, using the example of the 2016 US Presidential election, and listing implications for the Asian market.

Introduction.

The 2016 US presidential candidates

Emotions are the foundation of what makes us human. Emotions determine how we think and behave. The emotions we experience each day drive us to actions. These actions can be important or trivial, and everything in between (Myers, 2004).

Recently in the US elections, we saw how the media tried to play on people's emotions. Irrespective of what Trump or Clinton did, the media generally portrayed Trump in a negative light and Clinton in a positive light. To illustrate the point, figure 1 shows the positive versus negative sentiment indexes towards Trump portrayed by...

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