Timeline of Emotions as Tool

The best tool I can teach you comes from a joint project by the Nobel Peace Prize winning Dalai Lama and the psychologist Paul Ekman. Their Three Step “Timeline of Emotions” model helps us find a pattern in the oodles of emotional journeys we are stimulated to participate in each day, hour, minute and second.

We can read this “Timeline of Emotions” model - Trigger, Experience, Reaction - into a huge variety of emotionally resonant story telling forms - from Russian Disinformation to contemporary films, advertising, courting strategies and, really, any accidental or strategic measures that we (or others) use to affect emotions.

Source: Timeline of Emotions

The structural tool for parsing Spectacle. The Dalai Lama-Ekman “Timeline of Emotions” — Trigger, Experience, Reaction — gives us a framework for finding patterns in the “oodles of emotional journeys” the spectacle throws at us. TER applies to everything from Russian Disinformation to Netflix to advertising to courting strategies. It is the universal decoder ring for spectacle’s emotional mechanics.

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