Emotional Engagement
Emotional Engagement measures the intensity of the predicted emotional response, from all eight emotions together. Higher-energy emotions count more than calmer ones, but tone does not matter. A strong negative reaction scores like a strong positive one of similar energy.
What it measures
Emotional Engagement measures how strongly your creative is predicted to activate an emotional response, compared with a reference set of real creatives. A high score means people are likely to clearly feel something. A low score means they are likely to stay indifferent.
It measures intensity, not tone. It does not tell you whether the feeling is pleasant or unpleasant. That is what Valence is for.
In Metrics, Compare and on video scenes, this KPI is labelled "Emotion" (scene chip "Emo:").
What feeds it
Emotional Engagement is built from the eight predicted emotions: amusement, anger, awe, contentment, disgust, excitement, fear and sadness. Each is a predicted strength for your original creative. Emotion is always predicted on the file you uploaded, never on the platform-framed version.
How it's built
- Foresight looks at all eight emotions together and combines them into a single intensity value.
- Higher-energy emotions count more than calmer ones. Higher-energy emotions such as fear and excitement count more than calmer ones such as contentment and sadness.
- Polarity is ignored. No step of the calculation checks whether an emotion is positive or negative.
- The intensity value is positioned against the reference set and shown on a 0–100 scale, where 50 is roughly typical.
Two consequences follow:
- Valence does not change Emotional Engagement. Positive or negative tone neither raises nor lowers the score.
- A strong negative emotion is not "less engaging" than a strong positive one. A strong negative reaction is comparable to a strong positive reaction of similar energy. Differences come from the energy level of the emotions involved, not from their tone. Weak reactions, and reactions led by calmer emotions, lower the score.
Emotional Engagement is positioned against Foresight's reference creatives of the same media type: an image among images, a video among videos. See how scores are positioned.
Scale and direction
How strongly the creative is predicted to activate an emotional response, whatever the tone.
Higher means more emotionally activating. It is one of the E-Score's two pillars. Unlike the E-Score, it has no colour bands. Its chip shows whether it is above or below the comparison group, when there is one.
Image vs video
The calculation is the same for images and videos.
For a video, the overall value is computed from the emotional response averaged across the whole video. A short peak, or peaks of different emotions at different moments, is therefore softened in the overall score. The scene values and the emotion timeline show you the strong moments. See The emotion timeline.
Platforms
Choosing a platform changes Emotional Engagement only slightly: emotion is predicted on your original upload, and the platform adds only a small, fixed contribution from its own interface. For videos, no comparison value is shown, with or without a platform: scores are still positioned against reference videos.