The Science and Role of Emotional Triggers in Blog Titles

People, in general, are not cognitive creatures. We’re living beings with thoughts, yes, but also hopes, fears, dreams, desires, and regrets. Emotional regulation is an important part of the human experience, as is emotional expression. All art centers around emotional connections, after all.

As emotional creatures, humans can be manipulated with emotional appeals. The entire concept of rhetoric, and the interplay between ethos, pathos, and logos, is all about using emotional appeals alongside logical and topical persuasion to deliver your point.

Emotional triggers are everywhere. You can often recognize them in headlines, blog post titles, and other short-form writing by looking for trigger words. Words like “amazing” and “shocking” indicate an emotional trigger, whether it’s wonder and awe or fear and disdain.

Consider two headlines:

• BMI Correlations with Overall Health
• What Your BMI Says About Your Future

Both of these headlines can refer to the same blog post, covering an informative topic about body mass index, how it relates to various health outcomes, the shortcomings of BMI as a metric, and actionable advice to stay in a healthy range.

One, though, is a lot more compelling than the other. The second one has a few attributes that make it more emotional. It uses “your” to direct the topic to the reader specifically rather than a more objective, general statement. It brings up the future, which plays on fears and anxieties. The implicit promise behind the title is that an incorrect BMI has detrimental consequences on the future. It’s a promise, it’s a threat, and it’s a warning.

Another title that could refer to the same post could be:

• One Simple Metric That Could Save Your Life

It doesn’t even mention BMI in the title, though you’d find out quickly by reading the post. It’s a much more heavily emotional title, playing on hope and the idea that there are simple steps a person can take to promote healthier living.

These are all just very simple examples to illustrate the overall concept of emotional triggers. So, let’s dig in a little deeper. How can you use emotional triggers, and is there a line you shouldn’t cross?

Why Emotional Triggers Work

Emotional triggers work because, as I already mentioned, humans are emotional creatures. Even the ones who act like they’re coldly rational and purely logical are emotional – in fact, often more so than others – but it’s a trait we all share.

Powerful emotional triggers can cause people to act in one way or another or form opinions that are later leveraged in one way or another. Emotions can evoke nostalgia and convince people to make purchases, inspire loyalty in a brand or revulsion in a competitor, stir up a frenzy, weaponize the fear of missing out, and much more.

It’s no wonder that the people who are really good at it get jobs in media, politics, and marketing.

Emotional triggers and their impact on groups, large and small, across different origins and backgrounds is something psychology as an industry has been studying for a very long time.

Behavior is complex, and while we can distill some things down in aggregate, there are always counter-examples, so it’s not a settled science.

In terms of marketing, using emotional triggers is two things: the baseline needed to succeed, and a tool to take your efforts one step further.

Methods to Use Emotional Triggers in Marketing

Using emotional triggers is most effective in your blog post titles, advertising, and other short-form content. It’s harder to build and sustain an emotional resonance throughout the length of a blog post, and it often gets in the way of factual accuracy and can make your content feel thinner and less valuable or more biased, depending on the kind of emotion you’re trying to harness.

How can you leverage emotional triggers? It generally comes down to two things. The first is picking the emotion you want to use, and the second is picking the words and perspective that best trigger that emotion.

Feel-Good Emotional Resonance

One of the most common and basic forms of emotional trigger is the feel-good, happy, lighthearted kind of emotional resonance you find in a lot of modern advertising. Think of things like Apple Music TV commercials with people dancing to music they enjoy or every food commercial showing people enjoying the food they’re sampling.

The resonance here is clear. These people are happy partaking in the product, content, or brand being advertised. You’re also a person, possibly even a person who shares several demographic markers with the person depicted; perhaps you, also, can experience this happiness.

Happiness and joy-focused emotional triggers are also by far the safest kind of emotional triggers to use. For one thing, the threshold to experience some level of happiness is surprisingly low for most people, so even the simple pleasure of enjoying a piece of chocolate can be satisfying. Moreover, the failure state of a person who partakes but doesn’t experience that pleasure is generally just mild disappointment.

Trust, Safety, and Security

Another positive set of emotional triggers, trust, safety, and security are all interrelated. These are much narrower than simple happiness triggers and can generally only be used when you’re promoting something related to trust and safety. You generally see these in a couple of different ways, usually in the form of promoting a product by heavily emphasizing a warranty, guarantee, or series of positive testimonials.

The goal is to portray a product or piece of content as reliable and trustworthy. A lot of social proof falls into this category as well.

The downside to this kind of emotional appeal is that the penalty for failure is much worse. You’re attempting to build trust, and, as we all know, once trust is broken, it’s quite hard to repair. It’s one thing if you’re promising a warranty that doesn’t get honored as much as you like to claim, and it’s quite another if you’re talking about broad-scale infosec that gets breached, but the concept is the same.

Community and Belonging

“100,000 users can’t be wrong!” Community-focused emotional resonance is all about building up a sense of connection and belonging.

This tends to be less prominent in blogging because it’s so self-focused. Most self-promotional blog content is limited to news announcements because people don’t often want to read about you, at least not in the same kind of way. That said, when you have a large and active community, you can share their contributions and build on the emotional resonance of featuring their stories.

Anxiety and Worry

Now, we get into some of the more negative emotional triggers. Just as much as positive emotions are used in marketing, so too are negative emotions. Among the most common are simple anxiety triggers. Rather than highlighting the positive benefits of reading a piece of content, you highlight the negative repercussions of not reading it.

Since we’re talking specifically about blog post titles, here are some examples:

• FDA Finally Outlaws Soda Ingredient Banned Around the World

This one, pulled directly from my phone’s news feed, weaponized anxiety to get you to click through to see what this terrible ingredient is, why it’s banned, and what you might have done to yourself if you’ve been consuming it unwittingly all this time. (If you’re curious, it’s Brominated Vegetable Oil, and it seems to interfere with thyroid function, hence the ban.)

• Earth’s core has slowed so much it’s moving backward, scientists confirm. Here’s what it could mean.

This one comes straight from CNN, and it immediately weaponizes anxiety over half-remembered worries about magnetic pole shifts and devastating consequences for life on the planet. It’s mostly just an informative article – the earth’s core isn’t really spinning backward; it just slowed enough over time that it’s now spinning more slowly than the material around it and that it does this speed-and-slow routine on a 70-year cycle. But, really, the goal was to get you to click through in abstract anxiety, to read the content (and see the ads.)

You can see how just putting some uncertainty around a topic people worry about, either narrowly and specifically like health and nutrition or on a broader and more abstract level, can attract attention.

Fear of Missing Out

A more specific version of anxiety is the fear of missing out. FOMO centers around time-limited offers and scheduling pressure, ways to encourage people to take an action before that action is no longer available to them. Virtually everyone is susceptible to FOMO, though it works best on people with urges to collect everything, to be completionist, or to gather resources even if they don’t have immediate need of them.

FOMO, like many other emotional appeals, is more commonly found in advertising in other ways and less so in blog posts. You’re unlikely to see a blog post titled “This Blog Post Will Disappear in Seven Days,” right? Though, maybe that could work…

Anger and Frustration

When it comes to blog and other content titles, few emotional triggers are used as broadly and as effectively as anger, frustration, and similar negatives. There are, however, two ways this can go; positively and negatively.

Positive uses of anger and frustration are all about appealing to a problem that is shared amongst readers and promising a solution. A lot of marketing blog content, for example, might be about recovering from penalties, getting ahead of the competition, and overcoming walls in growth, things we all share, things we’re all frustrated by, and things that appeal to us as tricks we might learn to get ahead.

Negative uses of anger, meanwhile, tend to be found across social media, in the politics sphere, in news across the board, and in many other formats as well. These are your clickbait/ragebait posts, and you can see near-infinite examples just by scrolling… anything, anywhere, ever. It’s way too common and terrible, and yet it consistently works because if there’s one thing humans never seem to run out of, it’s anger.

Ethical and Moral Imperatives

Another, more neutral form of emotional trigger is the ethical and moral appeal.

These can overlap with both positive and negative emotional triggers, and can range from simple declarations of a company achieving carbon neutrality, to ways each product purchase helps the environment, to more direct appeals to fundraise for charity.

How to Use Emotional Triggers in Blog Post Titles?

Using emotional triggers can feel manipulative, and that’s because it kind of is. But then, that’s the entire point of marketing, isn’t it?

The key is to be authentic. Even when you’re using negative emotional triggers, if there’s something genuinely worth getting angry about, it’s not disingenuous to use that trigger.

The other key is to have something more to the emotional appeal than just the emotion itself. The difference between the effective use of a negative emotional trigger and frustrating ragebait is that ragebait uses anger to get you to read something with the goal of making you angry, whereas effective content uses anger to get you to read content about how you can take part in a movement to solve the problem making you angry.

On a more tangible level, the way you use emotional triggers is to use trigger words in your titles. Trigger words are essentially any word that brings some level of emotional resonance to a title. They can include everything from Free, Sale, New, Unlock, Huge, and Endorsed to more transparent appeals like Hurry, Obsession, Last Chance, Exploit, Terrific, and Unleashed.

Successful blog content knows its audience, knows what they want, and knows how to appeal to them. Emotional trigger words augment this knowledge and more directly align a topic with the intent.

I also highly recommend split-testing your article titles. Either use audience segmentation to test different links on social media, or just test over time, and see what kinds of emotional appeals work best at what levels. It’s an ongoing process to figure this all out, and it changes over time, to always keep an eye on it.

Remember, as long as you aren’t writing something that feels more like an academic journal article than a blog post, you’re probably using some level of emotional appeal. Your goal is to be more intentional about it.

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