Valence
Valence tells you whether the predicted emotional response is positive or negative. It runs from -100 to +100, with 0 as neutral. It is a diagnostic. It does not feed Emotional Engagement or the E-Score, and a higher value is not automatically better.
What it measures
Valence describes the emotional tone of the predicted response, meaning how positive or negative it is. Where Emotional Engagement tells you how strongly people are likely to feel something, Valence tells you what kind of feeling it is.
In the app, Valence is shown as Negative, Neutral or Positive, together with its number. The labels and colours follow the same rule on every screen and in reports: clearly positive and clearly negative values get their own label, and the wide middle range reads as Neutral.
What feeds it
Valence is built from the eight predicted emotions, predicted on your original creative:
- Positive emotions push it up: amusement, awe, contentment and excitement.
- Negative emotions push it down: anger, disgust, fear and sadness.
How it's built
Foresight weighs the positive emotions against the negative ones and places the result on a scale from −100 to +100. Unlike most other KPIs, Valence is not a ranking against the reference set. It describes the tone of your creative itself. To see how your creative stands against similar ones, compare it with the benchmark value shown next to it. In some cases no difference chip is shown for Valence.
Valence is a diagnostic. It is not an input to Emotional Engagement or to the E-Score.
Scale and direction
The emotional tone of the predicted response, from clearly negative to clearly positive.
- −100: clearly negative tone
- 0: neutral
- +100: clearly positive tone
A higher Valence means a more positive tone, not a better creative. The right tone depends on your objective.
When a comparison group is shown (unframed images only), the benchmark value for Valence is the average tone of that group and is often not 0, so a neutral creative can sit below its benchmark.
Image vs video
The calculation is the same for images and videos. For a video, the overall value comes from the emotional response averaged across the whole video. Values per scene are also available. Images and videos have their own benchmarks.
Platforms
Choosing a platform changes Valence 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.