Moldova’s Pasha Parfeni performing in the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest on May 9
Martin Meissner/Associated Press/Alamy
Moldova will be one of the most popular countries in the public vote at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, according to researchers who analyzed people’s physiological responses to eight performances.
Daniel Richardson of University College London and his colleagues challenged 60 Eurovision fans living in London with an average age of 31 to entries from Moldova, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Czech Republic and Spain. I asked him to watch the work.
The researchers chose these countries because Spain, Germany and Italy were certain to reach the final under Eurovision rules, while other countries were given better odds by bookmakers to reach the final. is. The UK and Ukraine were not included in the study because participants could be influenced by factors other than performance, such as patriotic prejudice or sympathy due to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
It turns out that all eight nations have qualified for the final, which will take place in Liverpool, England on May 13th.
The team monitored the heart rate and skin conductance levels of participants watching the performance. It was then used to predict how well these countries would perform in the popular vote. This accounts for half of the contest’s overall score.
The idea behind this prediction is that if many people are highly engaged with the same stimulus, their physiological responses are likely to be similar. “But if people are bored with the same stimuli, they may be bored in different ways,” says Richardson. “One person might be looking at a cell phone, another person might be staring out a window, and the physiological responses would all look different. At least that’s the hypothesis. I think we still need conclusive evidence to support that.”
Richardson and his team have previously found that heart rates in crowds watching musicals speed up and slow down at the same rate. Skin conductance reflects the amount of perspiration stimulated by adrenaline.
Researchers used the same approach to make predictions for last year’s Eurovision contest, but without much success. Richardson said he took into account last year’s results and revised the way heart rate and skin conductance data are combined for this year’s predictions.
The researchers expect Moldova to have the highest referendum among the countries surveyed in the study, followed by Norway and Germany. Researchers expect Spain to score the lowest.
But Richardson says he’s not particularly confident that Moldova will actually succeed. Currently, the probability of this country winning is about 250/1.
Moldovan’s entry is particularly theatrical, he says, and contains many shocking elements. “My hunch is that instead of measuring which songs people are most into by their quality, they measured their emotional response to songs that actually had a shock factor.”
If none of the team’s predictions come true this year, it’s unlikely they’ll repeat the experiment again, Richardson said. “Perhaps Eurovision is too strange and a random phenomenon to be subject to logic or science.”
The fact that the team’s predictions last year weren’t as accurate shows how difficult it is to measure emotional responses, says Sarah Garfinkel of University College London. “I still love the premise of the research and look forward to seeing how well they do this year.”
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