The language of happiness in self-reported descriptions of happy moments: Words, concepts, and entities

Abstract

This article attempts to study the language of happiness from a double perspective. First, the impact and relevance of sentiment words and expressions in self-reported descriptions of happiness are examined. Second, the sources of happiness that are mentioned in such descriptions are identified. A large sample of “happy moments” from the HappyDB corpus is processed employing advanced text analytics techniques. The sentiment analysis results reveal that positive lexical items have a limited role in the description of happy moments. For the second objective, unsupervised machine learning algorithms are used to extract and cluster keywords and manually label the resulting semantic classes. Results indicate that these classes, linguistically materialized in compact lexical families, accurately describe the sources of happiness, a result that is reinforced by our named entities analysis, which also reveals the important role that commercial products and services play as a source of happiness. Thus, this study attempts to provide methodological underpinnings for the automatic processing of self-reported happy moments, and contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic expression of happiness, with interdisciplinary implications for fields such as affective content analysis, sentiment analysis, and cultural, social and behavioural studies.