Abstract
Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and contingent questions: (1) What is the emotional spectrum of natural language? and (2) Are natural languages neutrally, positively, or negatively biased? Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias. More deeply, we characterize and quantify distributions of word positivity for four large and distinct corpora, demonstrating that their form is broadly invariant with respect to frequency of word use.
Highlights
While we regard ourselves as social animals, we have a history of actions running from selfless benevolence to extreme violence at all scales of society, and we remain scientifically and philosophically unsure as to what degree any individual or group is or should be cooperative and pro-social
How is the structure of the emotional content rendered in our stories, fact or fiction, and social interactions reflected in the collective, evolutionary construction of human language? Previous findings are mixed: suggestive evidence of a positive bias has been found in small samples of English words [10,11,12], framed as the Pollyanna Hypothesis [10] and Linguistic Positivity Bias [12], while experimental elicitation of emotional words has instead found a strong negative bias [13]
Our findings for these diverse English language corpora suggest that a positivity bias is universal, that the emotional spectrum of language is very close to self-similar with respect to frequency, and that in our stories and writings we tend toward prosocial communication
Summary
While we regard ourselves as social animals, we have a history of actions running from selfless benevolence to extreme violence at all scales of society, and we remain scientifically and philosophically unsure as to what degree any individual or group is or should be cooperative and pro-social. We refer to our ongoing studies as Language Assessment by Mechanical Turk, using the abbreviation labMT 1.0 data set for the present work (the full data set is provided as Corpus (Abbreviation): Twitter (TW) Google Books Project, English (GB) The New York Times (NYT) Music lyrics (ML) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029484.t001
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