On thinking, speaking and understanding
Language carries our individuality, our biography. It shapes and reflects us and our experiences, convictions and imprints. It can even fill the quiet moments, since we talk to no one more than to ourselves. Speaking and thinking enable reflection and understanding. The importance of language for us as humans, as a species and as individuals is therefore incomparable: we use it to ask questions and solve problems, to express ourselves and create comprehension, to understand ourselves and others and even to trigger emotions, sensations and feelings.
Finding the right words - a challenge
Etymologically, the word "emotion" comes from the Latin "emovere", which means "to move out, to set in motion". This is exactly what language can do. Words are able to transport feelings and bring concepts and ideas to life. Language triggers something, moves us and even manages to make the individual, subjective human experience not only comprehensible, but also experienceable and tangible. Thus, a poem, a story or a song lyric can describe one's own feeling so aptly that one feels it immediately. It is an overwhelming and unifying experience to feel and share one's own emotions through the words of another.
Likewise, the precise, comprehensible description of a concept, a theory, can open up a completely new world. The right words are able to break the boundaries of one's own world, to think and feel oneself deeper into it.
A current example is gender language. Only the linguistic confrontation with the concept of genders as a spectrum, without wanting to judge this, enables the mental confrontation with the concept. And it enables us all to deal with the reality of life of all those who do not feel and/or can not be defined as "male" or "female". Language creates and reflects reality.
For the scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt, language was the "formative, ordering organ of thought", the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted its individual and at the same time universal significance for the boundaries of the world. But how does one find the "right words"?
Formal criteria create new insights
At the end of the 20th century, the approach of formal-quantitative language analysis was developed. According to this approach, people with different imprints and behavioural tendencies also use language differently, formally and structurally. Based on this approach, the idea of a scientific measurability of language with regard to its effect was developed. Within the framework of the largest scientific study of its kind, language, psychology and AI were linked together - thus Emotion Analytics was created, an AI solution that analyses language on the basis of formal criteria and makes its effect measurable. The human experience of language, the psychology, even the emotionality in language becomes visible, thus reflectable and ultimately also changeable.
So if a CEO asks themself in the context of a large-scale transformation process whether their own communication has an appropriately optimistic, visionary and action-oriented effect - because it should - today there is the possibility to determine the effect of communication with Emotion Analytics and to change it if necessary. Of course, FOUR Emotion Analytics can also measure which customer approach is particularly successful for which group of people, whether and how the desired brand values are lived and communicated, and which communication profiles make up a successful team. Emotion Analytics gives concrete indications of which of the changeable parameters in language can be trained and how, and thus enables an individual development perspective. A targeted process of reflection and change is initiated from thinking, speaking and writing. This can break down old patterns of behaviour and effect and lead to more satisfaction, understanding and success - on both sides!
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More about VIER Emotion Analytics: https://www.vier.ai/en/products/vier-emotion-analytics/
