English language 'strongly biased toward being happy'

Washington, Jan 13 (ANI): Happier words, which indicate optimism and positivity, tend to dominate English language, researchers say.

A team led by University of Vermont mathematician Peter Dodds found that the English language is biased toward being happy.

"English, it turns out, is strongly biased toward being positive," said Dodds.n the study, Dodds and his colleagues gathered billions of words from four sources: twenty years of the New York Times, the Google Books Project (with millions of titles going back to 1520), Twitter and a half-century of music lyrics.

"The big surprise is that in each of these four sources it's the same," insisted Dodds.

"We looked at the top 5,000 words in each, in terms of frequency, and in all of those words you see a preponderance of happier words."

"It's not to say that everything is fine and happy. It's just that language is social," he stated.

In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species.

As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones.

"If you want to remain in a social contract with other people, you can't be a...," well, Dodds here used a word that is rather too negative to be fit to print - which makes the point.

The UVM researchers paid a group of volunteers to rate, from one to nine, their sense of the "happiness" - the emotional temperature - of the 10,222 most common words gathered from the four sources.

Averaging their scores, the volunteers rated, for example, "laughter" at 8.50, "food" 7.44, "truck" 5.48, "greed" 3.06 and "terrorist" 1.30.

The Vermont team - including Dodds, Isabel Kloumann, Chris Danforth, Kameron Harris, and Catherine Bliss - then took these scores and applied them to the huge pools of words they collected.

Unlike some other studies - with smaller samples or that elicited strong emotional words from volunteers - the new UVM study, based solely on frequency of use, found that "positive words strongly outnumber negative words overall."

"If we think of words as atoms and sentences as molecules that combine to form a whole text, 'we're looking at atoms,'" said Dodds.

"A lot of news is bad," he says, and short-term happiness may rise and and fall like the cycles of the economy, 'but the atoms of the story - of language - are, overall, on the positive side,'" Dodds added.

The study has been published in the journal PLoS ONE. (ANI)