Dr. Skye Cooley delivered a special guest lecture, "The Magic of Storytelling," as part of the UPAEP Global Summer program in Puebla, México. The session introduced participants to a framework connecting emotion, archetype, and narrative in strategic communication. Drawing on the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, communication scholar Walter Fisher, and psychologist Carl Jung, Dr. Cooley walked students through what he calls "emotional archaeology," a diagnostic tool for analyzing why some brand stories resonate and others fall flat. The lecture extended these foundational theories with insights from predictive processing and affective neuroscience, proposing that emotion functions as the primary mechanism through which people experience and construct reality, occurring before conscious thought takes shape. Students learned to apply a three-question diagnostic, examining a narrative's structure, its underlying archetype, and the emotion it generates, as a practical tool for building and evaluating brand stories.

Throughout the lecture, Dr. Cooley wove in five Mexican cultural examples to ground the concepts in the local context: the Nahua concept of in xochitl in cuicatl (flower and song) as an opening reflection on the power of words, the quinceañera as an illustration of inherited cultural narrative, telenovela plot twists as a lesson in narrative coherence, lucha libre's técnico and rudo characters as a vivid demonstration of Jungian archetypes, and the Bimbo bear as an example of the Caregiver archetype in brand identity. The session closed with a call for students to see themselves as "reality engineers," responsible for the emotional and narrative patterns they create through communication.

The lecture is part of Oklahoma State University's continued partnership with UPAEP through the Global Summer program, reflecting the university's commitment to bringing strategic communication scholarship to an international audience. For more information on Dr. Cooley's research, you can read "Emotion as Constitutive of Consciousness: A Predictive Processing Framework for Autonomous Experience" in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research.