Motivation and emotion/Book/2017/Optimal innovation and pleasure

Optimal innovation and pleasure:
How does optimal innovation influence pleasure?

Multimedia presentation (3 min)

Overview

Figure 1: when you have got a good idea

Optimal Innovation

The term "innovation" can be defined as something original and more effective and, as a consequence, new, that "breaks into" the market or society. It is related to, but not the same as, invention. Innovation is often manifested via the engineering process.

Definition of the optimal innovation: it was used when addressing the core question: what makes verbal stimuli pleasurable and/ or aesthetic? This leads to the evaluation of the salient, less-salient and non- salient meanings during the comprehension. ((Giora 1997, 1999, 2003; Jin Xiao, 2016) therefore, the optimal innovation is richer in meaning and leads to more pleasure or liking (Giora et al., 2004).

Associated theory

Optimal innovation Hypothesis : Giora, Fein, Kronrod, Elnatan, Shuval, and Zur ((Giora, Fein, Kotler, & Shuval, 2015c; Giora et al., 2004)) testing their Optimal Innovation Hypothesis. Giora et al. (2004) predicted that optimal innovative, thus moderately challenging, stimuli would be preferred over more salient stimuli as well as pure innovative stimuli. Optimal innovative stimuli involve stimuli that are both salient (i.e. familiar or (proto)typical) and novel (Giora et al., 2004). Multiple experiments confirmed that optimally innovative stimuli were indeed more pleasing than purely innovative stimuli or stimuli of salient nature (Giora et al., 2004).

Pleasurability is sensitive to optimal innovation. A stimulus would be optimally innovative if it involves:

1. a novel, noncoded, less-salient, or non-salient response to a stimulus, which differs not only quantitatively (similarity-wise) but primarily qualitatively (conceptually-wise) from the salient response(s) associated with it, while
2. allowing for the automatic recoverability of a coded, salient response (or responses; see Brône & Coulson, 2010) related to that stimulus, so that both responses may be weighed against each other, their similarity and differences assessable.

Figure 2: Street Art - Paint "Know Hope" on a postbox

Vitiation changing creates a novel expression that still allows for the recovery of the original expression. The resulting expression, therefore , comprises a double layer of connotation and is richer in meaning(Jin Xiao,2016 ) As Griora and her colleagues (2004) that would lead to increased pleasure for individuals which presents optimal innovation hypothesis. In 2016, Schiperoord further tested the optimal innovation hypothesis in the visual modality and offered a structural definition of visual optimal innovation:

1. Its base entity is a fixed visual expression with some formal (syntactic, lexical prosodic, and even orthographic) and conceptual properties.
2. The optimal innovation is created by a deviation of some of the base entity's formal properties.
3. The deviation must be such that it allows recovering the base entity.
4. The deviation involves a discretely different conceptual meaning.
5. The meaning of the optimal innovation combines the meaning of the base and the meaning of the deviation.

Case study 1: A case in point would be the novel, nonsalient Know hope1 , which allows for an insight into a default, salient meaning (“despair”) of a familiar collocation (No hope), while promoting a new one (“keep up hope in the face of despair”; see Giora et al., 2015c, 2004, pp. 116–117). Case study 2 : Another example would be the nondefault Body and sole—a name of a shoe shop—which deautomatizes the default body and soul while retaining it so as to get across the unique quality of the shoes associated with soul. Still, is activating a default incompatible yet related meaning the only way to affect Optimal Innovations?

Figure 3: Hands and Dove in a panting design

Accroding to ( xiao jie 2016) a VOI is a blended space where the information and structure from the base domain and the adoption domain are seen as being engaged in and projected onto. Correspondingly, the matter of cognitive process in VOI interpretation thus resolves into the matter of deconstructing or de-blending a VOI's input spaces and recovering its base and adaption domain cognitively. Also, Šorm and Steen (2013) in their research propose an integrated theoretical model of visual metaphor processing to explore how individuals make sense of a visual metaphor and the cognitive process thereof. From an incongruity resolution perspective, this theoretical model comprises three stages, in which the first step is to identify incongruities in terms of perceptual features and associate them with one’s prior knowledge. The second step is to resolve the incongruity by virtue of conceptual mappings between source and target domains, which leads to the final stage of an overall conceptualization of a visual metaphor. Toshniwal (2015) points out a structural similarity between the aforementioned two cognitive processes in relation to interpreting blended spaces provided by Schilperoord (2013) and Šorm and Steen (2013). To Sum up, he process of de-blending the input spaces correspondingly resembles the first step of incongruity identification. And the process of setting up mappings between input spaces bears similarity with the second step of incongruity resolution which involves conceptual mappings between two different domains.

Processing fluency theory Reber, Schwarz and Winkielman ( 2004) confirmed an argument to adopt visual metaphors in advertising is that they can facilitate aesthetic pleasure as a result of a fluent procession experience. According to the processing fluency theory (Reber et al., 2004 ) the ease with which people process a particular stimulus determines the level of felt aesthetic pleasure from that stimulus. Further more, the more fluently an object is processed, the more aesthetic pleasure is evoked (Reber et al., 2004 ) ( the notion of optimal innovation excludes familiar stimuli ( 1,5a/b) familiar stimuli do not meet any of the requirement in ( 7) from

no familiar response is recoverable so as to become instrumental in constructing the novel response)

( firstly optimal innovation can created words meaning changing not only just changing variations or variants, however, involves the salient, literal meaning that gets activated automatically (Pexman, Ferretti & Katz, 2000). Optimal innovation feeds on the familiar (1), but it also conveys an extra, unfamiliar sense. ) The optimal innovation hypothesis If a stimulus is optimally innovative it would be rated as more pleasurable than either a familiar stimulus or a purely innovative stimulus

The optimal innovation hypothesis revisited

So far the Optimal Innovation Hypothesis has been able to account only for the interplay between de-automatized default meanings and the invited non-default interpretations. However, the revised version proposed here extends its scope, allowing for the de-automatization of both default meanings as well as default interpretations. According to the Revised Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, then, pleasurability is sensitive to Optimal Innovation defined in terms of degree of Defaultness (rather than degree of Salience).

The revised optimal innovation hypothesis According to the Revised Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, a stimulus would be optimally innovative if it: (a) involves a nondefault response to a given stimulus, which differs from the default response(s) associated with it, both quantitatively and qualitatively, while (b) allowing for the automatic recoverability of the default response(s) related to that stimulus, so that both the default and nondefault responses may be weighed against each other, their similarity and differences assessable.

Pleasure

Pleasure is one of the simplest phenomena in psychology. It is a basic aspect of mental life, and an important feature of positive emotions.

Pleasure In Brain

Pleasures activate brain cerebral cortex (especially medial prefrontal cortex), amygdala, and deep brain structures such as nucleus accumbens and the midbrain dopamine neurons that project to it, the ventral pallidum which accumbens projects to in turn, and even some hindbrain structures. All these can be activated by pleasures. But not all need actually cause pleasure. Instead many brain co-activations are pleasure consequences, not pleasure causes (causing other psychological functions instead). So which brain events actually paint the pleasure gloss onto sensation?

Psychologists and neuroscientists are looking the causation of all pleasures. They identified several types of brain activation that cause a pleasure on sweet sensation.( Such as, they found that triggering activation of opioid circuits in the nucleus accumbens cause increased pleasure ‘liking’. The chain continues in structures that receive signals from accumbens, such as ventral pallidum, forming together a limbic circuit that paints the pleasure gloss. (Berridge, K. C. (2003)

Arousal

Appraisal theory of emotion: Post –Drive theory Accroding to ( Lindsley ,1957;Muoruzzi & Magoun, 1949) An arousal system in the brain stem and one of the center ideas in the study of arousal that is a moderate level of arousal coincides with the experience of pleasure and optimal performance.

The people prefer an optimal level of arousal ( Hebb, 1955)

Figure 4. Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions.

However, Pleasure as one of the positive emotion that is a broad class of mental states that humans and other animals experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking. It includes more specific mental states such as happiness, entertainment, enjoyment, ecstasy, and euphoria. The early psychological account of pleasure, the pleasure principle, describes it as a positive feedback mechanism, motivating the organism to recreate in the future the situation which it has just found pleasurable and to avoid situations that have caused pain in the past.^[1] The experience of pleasure is subjective and different individuals will experience different kinds and amounts of pleasure in the same situation. Many pleasurable experiences are associated with satisfying basic biological drives, such as eating, exercise, hygiene, and sex.^[2] The appreciation of cultural artifacts and activities such as art, music, dancing, and literature is often pleasurable.^[2]

Pleasure princlple: Obtain pleasure and avoid pain and do so at all costs and without delay----Freud

Based upon the incentive salience model of reward – the attractive and motivational property of a stimulus that induces approach behavior and consummatory behavior[2] – an intrinsic reward has two components: a "wanting" or desire component which is reflected in approach behavior and a "liking" or pleasure component that is reflected in consummatory behavior.[2] While all pleasurable stimuli are rewards, some rewards do not evoke pleasure.[2]

Psychology

Pleasure is considered to be one of the core dimensions of emotion. It can be described as the positive evaluation that forms the basis for several more elaborate evaluations such as "agreeable" or "nice". As such, pleasure is an affect and not an emotion, as it forms one component of several different emotions.[7] arise from cognitive evaluation of the self Pleasure is sometimes subdivided into fundamental pleasures that are closely related to survival (food, sex, and social belonging) and higher-order pleasures (e.g., viewing art and altruism).[8] The clinical condition of being unable to experience pleasure from usually enjoyable activities is called anhedonia. An active aversion to obtaining pleasure is called hedonophobia.

Pleasure is often regarded as a bipolar construct, meaning that the two ends of the spectrum from pleasant to unpleasant are mutually exclusive. This view is e.g. inherent in the circumflex model of affect.[9] Yet, some lines of research suggest that people do experience pleasant and unpleasant feelings at the same time, giving rise to so-called mixed feelings.[10][11][12]

The degree to which something or someone is experienced as pleasurable not only depends on its objective attributes (appearance, sound, taste, texture, etc.), but on beliefs about its history, about the circumstances of its creation, about its rarity, fame, or price, and on other non-intrinsic attributes, such as the social status or identity it conveys. For example, a sweater that has been worn by a celebrity will be more desired than an otherwise identical sweater that has not, though considerably less so if it has been washed.[13] Another example was when Grammy-winning, internationally acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell played in the Washington D.C. subway for 43 minutes, attracting little attention from the 1,097 people who passed by, and earning about $59 in tips.[13][14][15] Paul Bloom describes these phenomena as arising from a form of essentialism. Human beings are essentialists -- that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is.

Pleasure and optimal experience

Figure 5: Kids hands up when spark bright ideas

Flow theory

In example, Children experience the greatest pleasure following success in the context of optimal ( moderate) challenge. “I liked the hard ones because they gave you a sense of satisfaction, but really hard ones were just too frustrating”(Haryer, 1978b,p.796) practical implication of theory of flow theory is : Given the optimal challenge, any activity can be enjoyed. According to the Csikszentmihalyi’s “ optimal experience” with both challenge and skill low, literality all measure of emotion, motivation and cognition are at their lowest levels – the person simply doesn’t care about the task (Csikszentmihalyi, Rathune,& Whalen, 1993)

Positive affect

the positive affect subtly influence the information –processing flow ---what we think about, the decisions we make, creativity, judgements, risk-taking, and so on ( Isen, 198, 2002 )

Benefit of feeling good

Figure 6: Dunker's candle task,1945

people exposed to condition that allow them to feel good are more likely to solve the problems in creative ways( Isen et al., 1987) such as in the candle task(Dunker,1945) the positive affect participant solved the creativity-demanding candle task (Isen et al., 1987)

Interaction between optimal innovation and pleasure

Pleaser can be evoked in different ways, one of which is through visual rhetoric. A visual metaphor can thus be seen as a puzzle people need to resolve to understand the intended message. Solving a puzzle can be, again, a pleasant experience since it is discussed to flatter one’s intellectuality as it reinforces that (s)he possesses over the needed knowledge and wisdom to come with a solution (Phillips, 1997).

Limitations

As emotion has become acknowledged as a critical predictor of human behavior, the innovation literature has witnessed the rapid emergence of emotion as an important issue, although most scholarly attention has remained theoretical, thus lacking empirical evidence (Liu & Perrewe, 2005; Smollan, 2006). Until recently, empirical attention to this issue has been limited and has focused on a single, often acute, emotional experience such as fear or anxiety regarding a new technology (Venkatesh, 2000), and thus failed to attend to the broader array of theoretically meaningful emotions identified in the emotions literature.

First, it is necessary to identify and examine various types of organizational or work unit characteristics that could encourage learning, which shift organizational members' cognitive evaluations and collective emotions regarding the innovation (Antonacopoulou & Gabriel, 2001). In so doing, future studies may investigate the relevance and significance of various types of discrete emotions beyond the present focus on the valence of emotion, further expanding the scope of emotions activated in the context of innovation (Larsen & Diner, 1992; Posner et al., 2005).

Second, although the present data supported the paths from cognitive appraisal to emotions, there have been debates regarding the causal direction between cognition and emotion. Emotion researchers have emphasized that cognition and emotion should be considered as reciprocal processes that comprise interwoven and inseparable strands of human behavior (Lazarus, 1991; Lewis et al., 1984). Future studies could further examine this issue using longitudinal panel data that track changes in innovation-related cognitions and emotions over time.

Finally, the present study demonstrated that employees who shared the same work environment tend to share cognitive appraisals and emotions regarding the innovation. Although this finding seems quite obvious, it would be an intriguing research issue to theorize and explore the mechanisms through which organizational members develop similar patterns of perceptions, evaluations, emotions, and even behavior related to innovation implementation. In this regard, interpersonal processes including social information processing (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978), social learning (Bandura, 1986), and emotion contagion or interaction synchrony (Kelly & Barsade, 2001) can be a good starting point. In summary, our findings clearly present a need for greater attention to the emotional processes involved in the implementation of organizational innovations. This shift in research attention and the resulting balanced consideration of cognitive and emotional processes would offer theoretical explanations of innovation implementation that are more ecologically valid than those currently available.

Conclusion

Pleasure is a complex emotion resulting in positive affect. But pleasure can stagnate if it not challenged or exposed to new stimuli. these innovation in the way perceived stimuli,can enhance pleasure. Therefore, optimal innovation rewards some of new pleasure and find the new ways to stimuli centre cortex and arouse the pleasure receptors in the brain.

See also

• Attachment Type and Emotion (Book Chapter, 2016).
• Innovation (Wikipedia)
• Emotion (Wikipedia)
• Pleasure (Wikipedia)

References

Berridge, K. C. (2003). Pleasures of the brain. Brain and Cognition, 52(1), 106-128.

Berridge, K. C. (2004). Pleasure, unconscious affect, and irrational desire. In A. S. R. Manstead, N. H. Frijda & A. H.

Berridge, K. C. (2004). Simple Pleasures. New findings in hedonic psychology and affective neuroscience are revealing intriguing complexities. www,,apa.org/science/about/psa/2004/11/berridge.aspx

Giora, R. (2002). Optimal innovation and pleasure. In The April Fools' Day Workshop on Computational Humor, ITC-irst, Trento (pp. 11-28).

Giora, R. (2003). On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. New York: Oxford University Press.Giora, R., Fein, O., Kronrod, A., Elnatan, I., Shuval, N., & Zur, A. (2004). Weapons of mass distraction: Optimal innovation and pleasure ratings. Metaphor and Symbol, 19(2), 115-141.

Rachel Giora, Shir Givoni, Vered Heruti & Ofer Fein (2017) The Role of Defaultness in Affecting Pleasure: The Optimal Innovation Hypothesis Revisited, Metaphor and Symbol, 32:1, 1-18, DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2017.1272934

Reber, R. (2002). Reasons for the preference for symmetry. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25, 415-416. doi:10.1017/S0140525X02350076

Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364-382.

Jin Nam Choi, Sun Young Sung, Kyungmook Lee, Dong-Sung Cho (2010) Balancing cognition and emotion: Innovation implementation as a function of cognitive appraisal and emotional reactions toward innovation. Organizational Behavioural. Vol,32. Issue 1. Pp.,107-124

Schilperoord, J. (2016). Ways with Pictures: Visual incongruities and Metaphor. Unpublished manuscript.

Šorm, E., & Steen, G. J. (2013). Processing visual metaphor: A study in thinking out loud. Metaphor and the Social World, 3(3), 1-34.

Turner Jr, S.A., & Silvia, P.J. (2006). Must interesting things be pleasant? A test of competing appraisal structures. Emotion, 6(4), 670.

External links

• Paul Bloom, (2013, September 9th), "www,ted.com/talks/paul_bloom_the_origins_of_pleasure#t-948415 The Origins of Pleasure]".
• Ben Lillie ,(2013, September 9th)," ideas.ted.com/why-pleasure-is-important/ Why pleasure is important] ".
• Steve Johnson,(2010, September 9th),"www,ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from Where good ideas come from] ".