Measuring Emotion

This article and those listed below are part of Convene’s April 2025 issue. Find the turn-page versions of this and past issues at in our digital library. Illustrations by Ibrahim Rayintakath

We like to think that we are rational beings, but in fact, the vast majority of what we think and do is shaped by emotion and not by reason, according to Baba Shiv, a marketing professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Based on decades of evidence and his own research, Shiv estimates that between “90 to 95 percent of our decisions and behavior are constantly being shaped, non-consciously, by our emotional brain system,” Shiv told speaker and author Matt Abrahams on Abrahams’ podcast, “Think Faster, Talk Smarter.” If you want to persuade people, Shiv said, “first and foremost, you need to play into what the emotional brain is looking for.”

Feelings also play a role in learning and memory, making educational experiences that are tied to emotion more likely to stick with us. And according to psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina, positive emotions help us think more expansively and make stronger connections with others.

Many meeting organizers understand the primary role that emotional engagement and experiential factors play in their events, but more than half — 55 percent — said that they find that emotions are difficult to measure, according to the CEMA Events Maturity Benchmarking Study, published late last year. And in that same survey, a majority said that the return on experience or emotion (ROE) isn’t prioritized, compared with traditional return-on- investment (ROI) metrics.

With the articles below, we’ve set out to explore how event organizers define ROE and are designing events that put particpants’ emotion, experience, and engagement at their center — and the tools they use to measure that impact.