Recently, I listened to Tim Ferriss’ interview with Scott Adams, who is famous for creation of the Dilbert cartoon. He spoke, with great humour, about the power of positive affirmations (e.g. writing “I will become a famous cartoonist” 15 times a day, every day). Interestingly, the appeal of this technique has something to do with reticular activation system in the brain, which controls transitions between sleeping and awake states, and also between periods of low and high attention.
Similarly, we have a tendency to respond to emotionally-charged words, compared to emotionally-neutral ones of similar meaning (e.g. “to yank” is inherently funnier to post people than “to pull”). This gives the writers a particular technique, where they can purposely choose to replace a logically-correct words in their manuscripts with words that have similar (but necessarily identical) meaning, but which have a better potential to engage readers on the emotional level.
Perhaps, photographers can also be conscious about choosing post-processing techniques, for example, that would appeal to the viewers’ emotions (e.g. enhance grain, etc.) even at the expense of decreasing the “quality” of an image in terms of sharpness, exposure, etc.
