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Check out the results for their own webpage. Click "Try EffectCheck on this page!" here:

http://effectcheck.com/tour

I'm a little skeptical.

It rates "anxiety" as "medium-high." Yet I don't feel the slightest bit anxious reading that page. Nor does the author come off as anxious. It all feels very positive to me. (I'm counting the text alone, not the graphic design.)

It rates "compassion" as "very high." I wasn't able to find a description of what exactly the compassion measurement means in EffectCheck. But I'll go out on a limb and assume a high compassion rating means a text will either make you feel like the author is compassionate, or make you feel compassionate yourself. I don't feel either for that page. Not that it's hostile--I just don't feel anything on that axis when I read the page.

It's entirely possible that I've misunderstood how EffectCheck's ratings should be interpreted. It's also possible that I'm missing the point by comparing how I think I feel against EffectCheck's results. Maybe we're unreliable observers of how a text emotionally affects us, and EffectCheck more accurately predicts what's really going on deep in our brains. In which case, forgive my unwarranted naysaying.



>It's also possible that I'm missing the point by comparing how I think I feel against EffectCheck's results. Maybe we're unreliable observers of how a text emotionally affects us, and EffectCheck more accurately predicts what's really going on deep in our brains. In which case, forgive my unwarranted naysaying.

Bingo. Our algorithm focuses on the lingering, subliminal emotions that you aren't necessarily aware you're feeling. Though not related to the emotions we measure, one commonly-referenced study shows that if you're walking down the street and you see a big sign with the word "ELDERLY" written on it, you'll actually walk slower without realizing it [1]. Lots of words have these subconscious impacts and you simply cannot accurately poll your own brain to determine how you feel.

[1] See "Stumbling on Happiness" for a great overview of this study: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400077427/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...


How can we falsify your claims? That is, what is a test we can perform that if it went a certain way, would show that your claims are false?


That seems very believable in a general sense, and I have vague memories of other studies that suggest similar things.

The remaining question for me is whether and how EffectCheck's results have been compared against actual measurements of these subliminal effects.




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