Method and System for Assessing and Measuring Emotional Intensity to a Stimulus

A method for assessing the impact of non-verbal responses of a respondent to a stimulus comprising the steps of:

• presenting a reference stimulus to the respondent on a computer;
• presenting a stimulus under test to the respondent on a computer;
• recording an immediate non-verbal responses to said presented reference stimulus and stimulus under test via an imaging device connected to said computer;
• presenting a questionnaire with questions on the stimulus under test to the respondent on said computer;
• obtaining verbal responses to the questions;
• and sending the verbal responses across a communications network to a data processing unit;
• transmitting the recorded image of said non-verbal responses across said communications network to an image processing unit and
• after having received said images at said image processing unit automatically calculating a distribution of probabilities of one or a combination of an emotional state, a visual attention, a demographics of the face or a posture of the non-verbal response from said images;
• determining a emotion intensity score from combining of said predicted classification probabilities;
• and sending said predicted classification probabilities and emotion intensity score from said image processing unit to said data processing unit;
• and
• reporting an analysis of verbal responses by said determined emotion intensity score at the data processing unit.

A method for assessing the impact of non-verbal responses of a respondent to a stimulus comprising the steps of:

• presenting a reference stimulus to the respondent;
• presenting a stimulus under test to the respondent;
• recording immediate non-verbal responses via an imaging device to said presented reference stimulus and the stimulus under test;
• presenting a questionnaire with questions on the stimulus under test to the respondent;
• obtaining verbal responses to the questions;
• transmitting the recorded image of said non-verbal responses across a communications network to an image processing unit and
• after having received said images at said image processing unit calculating emotional probabilities of the non-verbal responses of the respondent by using statistical inferences of the received images;
• and
• determining an emotion intensity score from said probabilities.

A system for assessing the impact of non-verbal responses of a respondent to a stimulus, said system comprising

• a data processing unit with a reference stimulus, a stimulus under test and questions for said stimulus to be presented to the respondent;
• an image device for recording an immediate non-verbal response of said respondent to said presented stimulus;
• means for transmitting the recorded image of said non-verbal response across a communications network to an image processing unit;
• said image processing unit comprising means for automatically calculating emotional probabilities of the non-verbal response(s) of the respondent from said images employing statistical techniques;
• and
• said data processing unit comprises means for determining and emotion intensity score from said predicted classification probabilities and means for reporting at said a data processing unit an analysis of verbal response(s) by determined emotion intensity score.