Automated Behavioral Science Provides Crucial Emotion Measurement in an Uncertain Time

PORTSMOUTH, N.H.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#IAT–Sentient Decision Science, a leading provider of Emotional Intelligence for business, today announced the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued Notice of Allowance for a patent on the implicit association technology powering Sentient Prime. The issuance of U.S. Patent Application No.: 16/006,369 underscores the importance of emotional intelligence for businesses making market decisions in the face of unprecedented uncertainty.

Sentient Prime provides a scaled measurement of emotion that gives brands a competitive edge. This significant achievement in the Company’s history furthers Sentient Decision Science’s mission to advance the knowledge on the drivers of behavior to increase empathy to improve the human condition. The Patent applies to technology that measures the subconscious mind and provides a more accurate way to understand what consumers are truly feeling. A decade of applied scientific research at Sentient Decision Science has generated over a half billion subconscious associations with thousands of global brands, products, packages, advertisements and messages around the world. This Big Emotion Data is benefiting hundreds of businesses who have rapidly needed to gain insight on how consumers are feeling and why.

“If you are not measuring emotion, you’re not getting the whole truth. Without emotion measures, businesses launch unsuccessful new products, disastrous new package designs and advertising that is damaging to the brand,” said Sentient Decision Science Founder, CEO and co-inventor of Sentient Prime, Dr. Aaron Reid. “Sentient Prime’s technology through our automated platform provides scientific evidence of the market’s emotional response to your business moves, before you make them, creating better outcomes for the business and the consumer. Increasing the Emotional Intelligence of a business ultimately increases the ability to touch people in meaningful ways,” Dr. Reid emphasized. “This insight is improving customer experiences and creating authentic connections.”

Globally scaled measures of the subconscious are the latest example of how industry is innovating by pulling new knowledge from the behavioral sciences and making it practical. The most well-known measure of the subconscious, the implicit association test (IAT), was originally developed by social psychologists. It was applied as an assessment of implicit bias and stereotypes toward racial groups, gender, sexuality, age and religion. Sentient Decision Science took the IAT method out of the psychological labs of Universities and gave businesses global access through mobile devices to study consumer implicit attitudes. Businesses are getting sharp new insight through this consumer centric, empathic view, ultimately enabling the delivery of products, services and brand experiences that matter to people emotionally.

“With the research industry under increasing strain to understand consumer behavior in a changing world, the technology behind these automated behavioral science tools are providing the pressure release. The combination of scientifically valid measures of emotion with scaled mobile technology enables us to research the human emotional experience anywhere in the world,” said Clint Taylor, co-inventor of Sentient Prime and CTO at Sentient Decision Science.

The patent applies to the novel use of implicit association techniques, approach and avoidance behavioral measures and mobile technology. “Sentient Prime is being applied in many areas of research to help improve the human experience, including examining our senses. We use Sentient Prime in our proprietary research product, SonicPulse®. Our partnership with Sentient has heightened our ability to measure the impact of sound by understanding its emotional appeal,” said Joel Beckerman, Founder/Composer of Man Made Music. “Leveraging the subconscious allows us to uncover an implicit understanding of what the sound and music we create means to our audiences. This is an invaluable tool which is core to our business.”

“To see implicit research technology come full circle and be applied to the reduction of implicit bias in advertising is incredibly rewarding,” said Dr. Reid. “Advances in the automation of Emotion Measurement will not only improve business but will ultimately improve our well-being, encourage diversity and reduce bias towards others.”

Sentient Decision Science is offering free access to Sentient Prime for any researcher conducting work for public consumption on the emotional impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Using implicit research technology to study the emotional effects of COVID-19 can give us a deeper and more accurate understanding of how people are feeling and why. For more information visit: bit.ly/IATCOVID19

About Sentient Decision Science

Sentient Decision Science is a globally recognized behavioral science organization, advancing the methods and technology to quantify human emotion. For more information visit: www.sentientdecisionscience.com & www.sentientprime.com

Contacts

Jeremy Clough, VP Product & Marketing Strategy

Sentient Decision Science

jclough@sentientdecisionscience.com