We've all felt the impact of emotions. You can't work with someone or buy from them if you are angry at them. You can hardly say no to anything if you are in love with the person asking. There is little doubt that they have dramatic impact on human decision making at every level. Historically, though, we have not measured emotions very scientifically nor leveraged quantitative analysis to understand what's happening.
Emotions are difficult to study: there are many dimensions with both positve and negative valence, dramatic individual differences, social impacts, temporal effects and they are subject to the observer effect. If we think about an emotion in a certain way we can change it. If we ask people to write about their emotions we often get cognitive reflections of their emotions or what they want their emotions to be. With all these challenges, no wonder we stick to measuring rational elements of human behavior, even though we know emotional impacts are far greater in magnitude.
Recent developments, however, have made quantitative analysis of emotions within reach. Ecological momentary assessments give us accurate reflections of people's emotions on a consistent basis. New frameworks for understanding the 8+ dimensions of human emotion hae been developed recently. Lastly, with accurate data and effective frameworks we can put new high-dimensional quantitative analytics to work. These methods and others allow leaders to understand the enormous impact emotions are having on their organization, interactions with stakeholders and the decisions being made by everyone involved. 3 Points Rising has been using quantitative analytics for leadership assessment since 2005 and continues to pursue the cutting edge of emotional analytics in growing organizations.
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