Using so-called “big data,”* an international team of mathematicians, modelers, and linguists has validated the Pollyanna Hypothesis, first described in the psychological literature in 1969 by Jerry Boucher and Charles E. Osgood, which propounds that there’s a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently and diversely than negative words in communicating.
A UNIVERSAL HUMAN TENDENCY TO USE MORE OF POSITIVE
THAN NEGATIVE WORDS HAS BEEN CONFIRMED
The findings of the 14-member research team led by Peter Sheridan Dodds of the University of Vermont are detailed in their report, “Human language reveals a universal positivity bias,” which was published on February 9. 2015 in the journal
PNAS (acronym for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).
Based on their evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora—a collection of recorded utterances for making a descriptive language analysis—in 10 languages of diverse origin and culture, the research team came up with the following major findings: (1) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, (2) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and (3) this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use. The team also presented how the word evaluations they conducted can be used to construct physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement of the emotional content of large-scale texts.
The research team did their validation efforts for the Pollyanna Hypothesis with a set of “big data” tools not available back in 1969. They combed through Twitter,
The New York Times, the Google Books Project, Google’s Web Crawl, and a library of movie and television subtitles and song lyrics to draw up lists of the roughly 10,000 most frequently used words in each of 10 languages, namely Spanish, Portuguese, English, Indonesian, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean, and Chinese.
What follows is a TNS news report about the study as published in the February 10, 2015 issue of
The Manila Times:
Sometimes using several of these (“big data”) sources, the researchers generated a body of most-commonly used words in English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Egyptian Arabic. (To generate the body of most-commonly used words in the English language, for instance, the researchers used Google Books, The New York Times, Twitter and music lyrics.)
Then, they paid native speakers of each of those languages to rate how they felt in response to each of those words on a nine-point scale, where 1 is most negative or saddest, 5 is neutral, and 9 is most positive or happiest.
For each word, they collected 50 ratings from native speakers.
They found that each language, on the whole, uses positive words more frequently and in a wider range of forms than they do negative words. There were gradations of relative linguistic happiness, of course: Spanish, followed by Brazilian Portuguese, English and Indonesian, topped the list for happy language; Chinese appeared least happy, with Korean, Russian and Arabic — in that order — showing low but increasing levels of linguistic happiness.
The conclusion that this confirms the Pollyanna hypothesis comes with some big ifs: if the 10 languages studied successfully reflect the whole of human language; if the “corpora” of oft-used words in each of those languages accurately reflects the emotional balance of that language; and finally, if the language we use — and the frequency with which we use it — actually conveys our emotional states, and not just our circumstances.
This sort of “big data” approach is gaining increasing traction in the study of social networks, their impact on the larger society and their influence on individuals.
The authors assert that language-based instruments such as this might serve as “hedonometers,” or measures of overall happiness or satisfaction. Depending on what sources are used, such an instrument might reflect either bedrock levels of happiness or shifting moods across large populations of people sharing a language, a cultural outlook and a social network.
Read the TNS report, “Human language accentuates the positive, study says” in The Manila Times now!Read Susan Scutti's interpretative feature, "Is Human Nature Optimistic," in MedicalDaily.com now!Read the PDF file of the study, “Human language reveals a universal positivity bias,” now!-------------
*“Big data is a buzzword, or catch-phrase, used to describe a massive volume of both structured and unstructured data that is so large that it's difficult to process using traditional database and software techniques. In most enterprise scenarios the data is too big or it moves too fast or it exceeds current processing capacity. Big data has the potential to help companies improve operations and make faster, more intelligent decisions... An example of big data might be petabytes (1,024 terabytes) or exabytes (1,024 petabytes) of data consisting of billions to trillions of records of millions of people—all from different sources (e.g. Web, sales, customer contact center, social media, mobile data and so on). The data is typically loosely structured data that is often incomplete and inaccessible.”—WebopediaOTHER INTERESTING READINGS:
Eyes wide shut. In “How spelling keeps kids from learning,” Washington, D.C.-based writer Luba Vangelova argues that written English is great for puns but terrible for learning to read or write. “It’s like making children from around the world complete an obstacle course to fully participate in society but requiring the English-speaking participants to wear blindfolds,” Vangelova says, attributing the wide disparities in rates of learning English from country to country to its often bewildering spelling and pronunciation than to teaching style and quality.
Read Luba Vangelova’s “How spelling keeps kids from learning” in TheAtlantic.com now!Regurgitated answers. In “Language, creative thinking trip up matrics,” a report in the February 11, 2015 issue of the website
iol.co.za, Leanne Jansen from Durban, South Africa, reports that a major reason for the inability of pupils to cope with specific test questions in 11 academic subjects, including mathematics and the sciences, is poor language skills coupled with their teachers’ poor grasp of the content they teach. Pupils would battle with questions that require independent or creative thought, Jansen says, in many instances just regurgitating answers to past test questions that they have memorized.
Read Leanne Jansen’s “Language, creative thinking trip up matrics” in the iol.co.za website now!
