Facial Coding Expert Dan Hill Proves People Vote for President with their Hearts

It’s going to be a loooong Presidential campaign that requires a fresh approach to understanding whose got the edge? Dan Hill, president of Sensory Logic, Inc., (www.SensoryLogic.com) will present cutting-edge research and analysis to provide valuable insights into the emotional states and appeals of the Democratic and Republican fields. 

 Hill’s presentation, “Getting Votes One Heart at a Time: A Comparative Profile of the Emotional Appeals of the 2008 Presidential Candidates,” will answer key questions: which candidates are the most and least trustworthy, and how do their personality traits affect their electibility.
 

“Everybody knows politics is emotional but recent breakthroughs in brain science have confirmed that most of what motivates people to act happens on a subconscious, intuitive level,” says Hill, whose second book, “Emotionomics, Winning Hearts and Minds,” has just been published.  “Voters decide in their guts whether they like, trust and feel motivated to go to the polls to support a given candidate. Historically, however, the problem has been how to quantify and predict how the voting public will espond to the candidates.”


Verbal input – through polls – is notoriously inaccurate. People may give the politically correct answer or the smart, safe, acceptable answer – and not express how they really feel.  And, a tendency to hold back on acknowledging biases may be especially significant in a race that features a woman, an African-American,

The presentation consisted of three parts. The initial section will briefly explain how breakthroughs in brain science have confirmed th99% of people’s mental processing happens subconsciously, andthat all of us – as voters – feel before we think, privileging emotional responses to the candidates.
 
Secondly, Hill reviewed his assessments of the characteristic facial expressions of each of the candidates, and what they convey about their traits and how they are likely to perform in office if elected. These assessments are based on having recently seen all of the candidates live, in-person at forums in Iowa, including the Ames Straw Poll and a Labor RallyCedar Rapids, as well as from televised debates. Some analysis has been previewed on Fox’s Genuine enjoyment
 
Finally, Hill shared data from tests conducted with Iowa residents screened on the basis of having been caucus go-ers in 2000 and/or 2004The analysis will cover how the candidates have been received in their television spots, in excerpts from stump speeches



Hill is the founder and president of Sensory Logic, Inc., a scientific research-based consultancy that specializes in gauging sensory-emotivreactions. The company was founded in 1998, with clients including: Target, Toyota, GlaxoSmithKline, AllState, Best Buy, CBS and Staples among the ranks of the Fortune 500 globally. Hill and his company have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, China Forbes, Businesson NPR’s “Marketplace.” In 2004, Hill critiqued the Bush/Kerry Presidential debates for The New York Times.



Hill’s latest book, Emotionomics: Winning Hearts and Minds (Adams Business & Professional), has received major endorsements from Philip Kotler, Seth Godin and a host of business thought leaders. His first book, Body of Truth: Leveraging What Consumers Can’t or Won’t.

Prior to launching Sensory Logic, Hill was director of executive communications for PSE&G and a regulatory analyst for the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs. He received a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University and a M.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University after studies at Oxford University and St. Olaf College
 

Hill’s findings draw on two scientific, behaviorally-based research tools: facial coding and eye tracking. Facial coding owes itsDarwin, who was the first scientist to take emotions seriously and also the first to seriously study the fact that our faces reflect and communicate our emotions – even aperson born blind has the same facial expressions as the sighted because the ability is hardwired into the brain, i.e., it’s universal in nature. Further biological facts that favor facial coding as a practice is that the face is the only placewhere the muscles attach directly to the skin – providingunparalleled spontaneity.

 Darwin’s original work was greatly supplemented by Dr. Paul Ekman and Dr. Wally Friesen, who codified their findings into the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) from1965 to 1978, ments. The system is based on how 43 key facial muscles correspo23 action units (AU’s), i.e., combinations of muscle activities that correspond to seven core emotions apparent across cultures. Those emotions are: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust and contempt. Sensory Logic hired Dr. Ekman as a consultant and haboth granted and pending for its proprietary scoring system and applications of facial coding. The process normally involves revievideo files down to 1/30th of a second on a computer monitor.

Eye tracking is based on being able to monitor down to 1/25th of a second where somebody is looking when viewing stimuli. The system was developed by Tobii, a Swedish company, with output that tracks where people look in terms of duration and sequential order. The results can both be shown through colored “hot spots” that show the areas of concentrated gaze, as well as the numbering of where and in what pattern people typically look at the stimuli.