The plethora of F-bombs used in everyday life seems to indicate universal human dissatisfaction. Yet, according to researchers at the University of Vermont, all languages — despite the swearing — reflect a bias for the use of happy words.
As reported in the Feb. 9 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab determined evidence to support the 1969 Pollyanna Hypothesis that there is a universal human tendency toward positivity.
The research team, lead by University of Vermont mathematicians Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, analyzed billions of individual words collected from 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, simplified Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic.
The scientists amassed these massive data sets from 24 types of sources, including books, news outlets, websites, movie subtitles, twitter feeds and music lyrics, eventually identifying the about 10,000 most frequently used words of each of the languages.
The researchers then recruited native speakers to rate their emotional responses to the commonly utilized words of their respective languages on a numerical nine-point scale with 1 being the saddest and 9 the happiest. For example, for English “laughter” was rated 8.50, “food” 7.44, “truck” 5.48, “the” 4.98, “greed” 3.06 and “terrorist” 1.30. Overall, the team discovered that Spanish was the most positively biased language and Chinese the least, based on the average word happiness of Spanish-language sites and digitized Chinese books.
Nevertheless, the results revealed that all 10 languages were positively skewed above the neutral score of 5 on the 1 to 9 scale. Otherwise, if bias had been absent from the data, the median values of the words would have scored in the middle at around 5, an emotional value that corresponded in every language to neutral words like “the.” Moreover, the team found that emotional ratings persisted upon translating words between languages.
The positively skewed bias of the emotional responses led the researchers to conclude that people tended to use more happy words than sad ones on average. While not all large-scale texts can be described as positively skewed, the team speculates that human language is inherently skewed toward happiness, with more positive than negative words.
In further studies testing the Pollyanna Hypothesis, the research team intends to evaluate the word happiness of other languages, and they plan to extend their study of the positivity of language to phrases instead of merely individual words.
In an application of their findings, the team has constructed a happiness meter called a “hedonometer” with which they have measured the average word happiness of over 10,000 works of literature. The “hedonometer” has enabled the scientists to trace the emotional trajectories of works such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo.
The researchers have also tested the reliability of their “hedonometer” by tracing the happiness signals of English-language Twitter posts and comparing them to findings reported by Gallup well-being polls. Although the scientists have discerned a strong correlation between such sources, they intend to further refine their instrument, using their data sets on the universal positivity of human language.
