Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 112, Issue 8, Pages 2389-2394Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1411678112
Keywords
language; social psychology; happiness; positivity
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation CAREER Award [0846668]
- Divn Of Social and Economic Sciences
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [0846668] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (i) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, (ii) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and (iii) this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use. Alongside these general regularities, we describe interlanguage variations in the emotional spectrum of languages that allow us to rank corpora. We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement of the emotional content of large-scale texts.
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