A new study analyzes vocabulary
from around the world and finds a universal skew toward the positive.
JULIE BECKFEB
In the time of Twitter and
Internet comments, it’s not hard to find language being used for evil. People
take the remarkable human capacity for communication and wield it like a big
dumb ax, hacking into anything and anyone they don’t like.
When you see enough of that,
it’s easy to forget that people also use language as a scalpel, to dissect and
understand complex things, and as a salve, to help and heal each other. They
write the kind of sweet notes people love to share on social media, maybe as a
deliberate antidote to all the online hate.
Thanks to a large data
analysis, we now know that the latter outweighs the former. A new study
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined
100,000 words across texts in 10 different languages and found “a universal
positivity bias.”
In every language, on every
platform, the median happiness score was higher than five.
This bias was first posited in
1969, when a pair of psychologists wrote a paper called “The Pollyanna
Hypothesis,” named for the fictional orphan girl with a propensity to look on the
bright side. The original study had high school boys, who belonged to different
cultures and spoke different languages, do word association tasks, and then
ranked whether the pairs were positive or negative. More often, they were
positive.
In the new PNAS study,
researchers analyzed texts from Google Books, Twitter, the New York Times, a
Google Web Crawl, subtitles from movies and TV shows, and music lyrics. They
measured how frequently words were used in each language (English, German,
Chinese, Korean, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, and
Indonesian), and had native speakers rate how negative or positive they felt
upon hearing those words.
In every language, on every
platform, the median happiness score was higher than five—five being a totally
neutral word—as seen in the chart below. The yellow is the “above-neutral”
portion, and the blue is the “below-neutral.”
PNAS
Though all the languages
studied seemed predisposed to positivity, there are differences between them.
Spanish and Portuguese were the most happy, in this study. For some languages,
it really depended what kind of text the researchers were looking at—in
English, music lyrics were significantly less positive than books, the New York
Times, or even Twitter.
So all the languages studied
tended to use happy words more often, but overall, languages also contained
more happy than unhappy words. The researchers also measured “average word
happiness” and found it to be high, regardless of how frequently those words
were used in the text. So even lesser-used words were more often positive than
negative.
“Words, which are the atoms of
human language, present an emotional spectrum with a universal, self-similar
positive bias,” the researchers write. While individual texts—books, songs,
tweets—may skew negative, all in all, it looks like language is a positive
tool.