Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter
(Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features )
With the US east coast inching towards recovery following hurricane Sandy, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are back on the campaign trail for the final days before the US presidential election.
National polls show the race is essentially deadlocked - but typical polling can be fickle. So last week we asked readers to take part in an online project designed to give a more fine-grained view of the public's reactions to politics.
About 80 readers watched clips from the third and final presidential debate while face-reading software recorded subtle emotional cues via webcams. Developed by Affectiva of Waltham, Massachusetts, the software tracked six categories of expression: smiles, surprise, confusion or dislike, disgust, attention, and valence, a general measure of how positively or negatively the viewer reacted to the clips.
Such information could one day be used by pundits to assess reactions to debates and attack ads, or by the candidates themselves to tailor their messages and even their body language.
"You're giving people a non-verbal voice," says company co-founder Rana el Kaliouby. "We're enabling people to say, 'You know what, this particular comment or approach to these political views resonated with me,' or not. A poll doesn't give you that nuanced information."
An interactive graph lets you explore our readers' responses to the final debate. Here's what jumped out at us:
Romney may be right to keep talking about China In past speeches, Romney has said that he would declare China a currency manipulator on his first day in office. In the third debate, he responded to worries that such action might spark a trade war, arguing that because China sells more to the US than it buys, it will want to avoid one. In our survey, respondents who identified as Independents generally seemed to buy his argument: their valence was positive throughout the China clip, and was generally higher than either Democrats' or Republicans'.
Obama should shy away from 9/11 stories Addressing the death of Osama bin Laden, Obama told an anecdote about a woman who felt the news gave her closure. But as soon as he started the tale, valence for Independent voters dropped sharply. Those who said they favoured Romney during the overall segment had a similar response, while Obama supporters showed only a mild rise.
"Horses and bayonets" bridged the political divide Obama's barbed reply to Romney's criticism that the US navy has fewer ships than it did in 1916 quickly became an internet meme. The segment also scored highest on the "attention" metric and lowest on "confusion/dislike" among our survey participants. The "horses and bayonets" comment drew big smiles, even from self-identified Republicans - although there were only four of them in our sample. One interpretation is that "Obama did great there", says el Kaliouby. "He captured people's attention, and people reacted positively, even the Romney supporters." But it's also possible that the segment was simply familiar by the time our viewers watched the clip.
Obama's Middle East activities stir up emotion abroad About 30 per cent of our viewers were not in the US or are not eligible to vote in the election. That didn't make much difference for most of the study. But in one clip, Romney criticised Obama's diplomacy tour of the Middle East, calling it an "apology tour". US residents perked up then, but non-US residents' valence took a nosedive. It's not clear if their dissatisfaction was because they agreed with Romney's criticism and were upset at the president, or if they supported Obama's Middle East tour and took issue with Romney's reproach.
Be wary of overstating your case The candidates sparred over who would have better handled the 2008 auto industry crisis in Detroit. Obama issued a government bailout; Romney wrote an op-ed in The New York Times titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt". Romney defended his position during the debate, citing his Detroit roots and claiming he would never do anything to hurt the auto industry. Republicans and Independents seemed happy with his argument, until Romney got bombastic, calling the suggestion that he would liquidate the industry "the height of silliness". Valence for Republicans and Independents took a downturn there.
We're not the only ones interested in whether Affectiva's software could be useful for politicians. A team led by Duane Varan of Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, led a focus group to see how viewers responded to the debates in real time.
He had 14 Democrats and 14 Republicans in Austin, Texas, watch all three presidential debates and the vice-presidential debate as they aired on national television. Sensors on their skin monitored electrical conductance, a measure of the intensity of viewers' reactions. Affectiva's face-reading software watched for smiles, which Varan thinks is the most recognisable emotion. Surprisingly, when grins appeared, they were huge.
"The humour that is evoked in a debate is more intense than the type of humour that we see even in the best sitcoms," Varan says. "The reason for that is you have much greater build-up of tension that is suddenly released."
In Varan's group, only Democrats found the "horses and bayonets" line funny. But when Romney declared in the first debate that he would cut funding to public television despite his love of Big Bird, everybody was amused.
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