Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-24-2015
Abstract
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.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Dodds PS, Clark EM, Desu S, Frank MR, Reagan AJ, Williams JR, Mitchell L, Harris KD, Kloumann IM, Bagrow JP, Megerdoomian K. Human language reveals a universal positivity bias. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2015 Feb 24;112(8):2389-94.
DOI
10.1073/pnas.1411678112