Emote control

I am a focus group of one. I am inescapably honest.

I am sitting in front of a monitor, wired with electrodes: one on each side of my chest, one on my belly, two on the fleshiest parts of my left-hand index and middle fingers. Another device is tracking the movement of my eyes, bouncing an infrared light off the inside of my head.

I am watching a video of "30 Rock," the NBC sitcom. And every time Alec Baldwin appears on the screen, my vital signs start to dance. My skin gets sweatier. My breathing gets faster. I shift in my seat. At one point, my heart rate jumps from 102 beats per minute to 128. I am, in the patented terminology of Innerscope Research , officially "engaged."

OK, maybe this isn't rocket science. I love "30 Rock," and Baldwin doesn't even have to speak to make me giggle. But the electrodes taped to my skin measure other things, too. When I watch a commercial for a Virgin Mobile telephone, my heart rate skips during the punch lines. When I watch a clip of "ER," more air enters my lungs -- imperceptibly to me -- the moment a car crash victim is revealed to be a child.

Comedy and drama might be subjective forms of art, but the entertainment business is built on hard and fast numbers. Film studios and television networks are constantly counting viewers and using focus groups to gauge their responses. Nielsen Media Research , which tracks television viewership, has been phasing out its paper forms in favor of electronic set-top boxes -- and now is testing a portable device that records every ad people are exposed to. And marketers have long sought biological ways to measure audience reaction -- going to such lengths as showing people movie trailers while they lie in MRI machines.

That's because human beings are notoriously unreliable, says Carl Marci, the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who co-founded Innerscope last year with Brian Levine, his former graduate student from MIT. Sometimes people lie; that was a longstanding complaint about those Nielsen forms. But often, Marci says, they're simply incapable of telling the whole truth -- because of social filters, cultural norms, language barriers, the sheer force of biology.

There's no direct link, Marci says, between the emotional centers of the brain and the language centers. The conscious experience represents only 5 to 25 percent of what the brain is doing. We're feeling TV, movies, and ads in ways that we can't articulate.

And we're taking in information in ways we don't even realize. That's why NBC hired Innerscope this spring to test what viewers comprehend when they fast-forward through commercials on their DVRs. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the company hooked test-viewers up to watch the drama "Heroes" at regular speed and on fast-forward. NBC did not respond to requests for comment and Innerscope declined to offer more information, saying the data was proprietary. But the network's head of research told The Hollywood Reporter that, according to initial analysis, people comprehend some snippets of what they see.

And 20th Century Fox has used Innerscope to test-market trailers for the films "28 Weeks Later" and "Live Free or Die Hard" -- and plans to use the company to measure audience reaction in Japan and the United Kingdom.

"I'd been waiting for something like this to come on the market, in terms of market research," said Melissa Mullen , director of research for Fox's international theatrical division. She has a background in neuroscience herself and said the technology opens up new avenues of truth.

In Japan, for instance, cultural boundaries often get in the way of traditional focus groups: "The Japanese always tell you what they think you want to hear," Mullen said . "They're always, 'I like this,' or 'Oh, I'm definitely going to go . . .' It's really tough for us, because we get results back that all look the same."

Still, she said, Innerscope's work raised eyebrows, at first, among some of her marketing colleagues.

"The initial comments were, 'Wow, that's a little too "Minority Report" for me,' " Mullen said. "But then they all thought it was great once they saw it, and saw that you could get the results back right away. And they're really excited about it."

Innerscope operates from a spare, Ikea-furnished office on the less-posh side of Newbury Street -- and the furniture is key, since the company aims to test people in a lifelike setting, as opposed to a lab. (They also take pains to hide their electrodes in lightweight shirts and their recording equipment in fanny packs.) They have five employees, not all of them full-time, and tend to work for a single client at a time. But they've been gaining attention in the marketing field; Mullen says she first heard about them through the consumer-research grapevine.

The company grew from a project Levine was assigned at MIT, in a class about finding commercial use s for burgeoning technology. He had developed websites for the Gap, Electronic Arts, and Major League Baseball teams, and he went back to school to learn how to better measure what people were looking at. Marci, one of his instructors, is the director of social neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and pioneered physical ways to measure doctor-patient empathy. He has applied the technology to medicine; he ran a study in 2005 at Massachusetts General Hospital that used biological measures to determine how patients responded to psychiatric treatment.

But Marci's wife had long worked in marketing, and he understood the flaws of the traditional focus group: the way a single subject could dominate the conversation, the way social filters interfered. And he figured technology could chip away at the lingering mysteries -- suggest not just whether people liked or didn't like a movie or a TV show, but why.

So Levine and Marci fitted electrodes into stretchy T-shirts, tested vital signs, and developed a formula for measuring viewer engagement -- they define it as "attention to something that moves you." They designed a way to track engagement on a graph, and watch it wax and wane. (Individual data like mine isn't used on its own; it's added to other test subjects', to get the big picture.)

For the "Live Free or Die Hard" focus groups, Marci and Levine played two different trailers while measuring subjects' skin conductivity, heart rate, respiration, and motion. One trailer was a hit on the engagement meter; the other fared poorly -- though the studio knew that already, from self-reported marketing tests.

But by tracing the spikes and dips of engagement over time, Marci and Levine could pinpoint exactly what worked and what didn't. One trailer, they discovered, grabbed viewers from the outset -- the moment Fox's logo appeared, then flickered out -- and built up engagement from there. The other lost its audience almost instantly, after a scene that featured Bruce Willis talking about somebody's apartment.

Another time, Marci and Levine tested a Heineken ad with a group of 19-to-25-year-old single men in the Boston area. The joke -- a guy who tried to impress a girl by secretly swapping his generic beer for a pair of Heinekens -- scored beautifully on audience engagement. But eye-tracking data showed that when the "Heineken" logo was most prominent on the screen, viewers were looking elsewhere, trying to read the label on the generic six-pack.

The research, Levine and Marci say, leads to practical conclusions: An agency could tweak the ad to maximize the impact of a punch line. And they say their findings could also help in developing plots for TV shows and movies. In one test of a sitcom, they found that viewers who didn't like the show still identified emotionally with certain characters and plots. The data, Marci says, could convince networks "to finally move away from repetitive content, and everything's sex and violence. People can get engaged with story, relationships. We want to be a catalyst to creative content."

Still, the technology draws its skeptics -- and the very notion of using biology to predict behavior can make some people uneasy.

"I think there's something deeply depressing about taking more complex human emotive responses and simplifying them in this sort of way," said Tom Hollihan , a communications professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School. "That just reduces us to purely physical beings, as opposed to thinking beings."

But Levine says Innerscope's work won't replace the focus group, or eliminate the need for self-reported responses.

"It's not that we're reading minds," he said. "It's that we're finding these group responses that are just below the surface. . . . Maybe what we can do is we can create a commercial that is more effective to the people who would be responding anyway. The creatives still have creative control. We're just giving them an additional layer of information."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to www.viewerdiscretion.net.