Mayew & Venkatachalam’s recent article on “The Power of Voice…” (Mayew & Venkatachalam, 2012) shows that academics are not immune to the fallacies of pseudoscience. This is a potential problem because academics may end up endorsing bogus technologies that, if spread, may affect peoples’ lives or at least deviate funding that should be applied to meaningful technologies.

We are currently attempting to investigate the phonetic conditions under which the emotion analysis technology used by Mayew & Venkatachalam generates “interpretable” results. A possible scenario is that the quasi-random character of such “emotion analyses”, in connection with ill-defined experimental conditions, offers results that can be forced into suitable interpretations.

A report from this study is expected to be ready for publication by September/October 2012.

Mayew, W. J., & Venkatachalam, M. (2012). The Power of Voice: Managerial Affective States and Future Firm Performance. The Journal of Finance, 67(1), 1-44.