Happiness and the English Language

[n2doc]

By Brandon Keim December 13, 2011 | 6:30 am


The words in four massive text databases — 361 billion words in 3.29 million books on Google Books, 9 billion words in 821 million tweets issued between 2008 and 2010, 1 billion words in 1.8 million New York Times articles published from 1987 to 2007, and 58.6 million words from the lyrics of 295,000 popular songs — were analyzed, collated and distilled into a list of most-used words, then scored on their emotional resonance. The result: English seems to be a happy language, with positive words used more often than negative.

In these graphs, negativity and positivity flow from left to right along the x-axes, and word frequency is measured on the y-axes.

Image: Kloumann et al./arXiv

Citation: “Positivity of the English language.” By Isabel M. Kloumann, Christopher M. Danforth, Kameron Decker Harris, Catherine A. Bliss, Peter Sheridan Dodds. arXiv, August 29, 2011.

[progressoid]

1. Cool but...

is there a link to this study? I wanna read more.

Thanks.

[n2doc]

2. That's all there is on this image

Part of a bigger article:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/science-graphics/

[Jim__]

3. Here's a link to the original (?) pdf:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1108/1108.5192v2.pdf

[redqueen]

4. I wonder if sarcasm was taken into account. (nt)

[lazarus]

5. I would be interested in comparisons

how happy is English compared to Mandarin, or Russian, or Spanish?