Photo Credit: Warm n Fuzzy
Even if a news story sounds negative, its “subtle energy” may be positive, if by that we are are talking about the energy of affect. A new article in ScienceDaily reports that English has a bias towards positivity:
In the new 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,” says 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.”
Or, as they write in their study, “a positivity bias is universal,” both for very common words and less common ones and across sources as diverse as tweets, lyrics and British literature.
Homo narrativus
Why is this? “It’s not to say that everything is fine and happy,” Dodds says. “It’s just that language is social.”
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….
If we think of words as atoms and sentences as molecules that combine to form a whole text, “we’re looking at atoms,” says 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.”
via We may be less happy, but our language isn’t.
A beautiful piece of research! I would love to see more work done like this on the subtle energetics of language.
How do different languages compare in terms of positivity? How do you score different literary works and online media in terms of positivity? What sort of distinctions can you make in terms of different sorts of positivity? Do people from different demographics or stations of life perceive positivity differently? How do people respond to the positivity of proper nouns, including personal names?
The possibilities for investigation are boundless … and the opportunities are ripe for bringing greater consciousness to how we use language, and thus how we participate in the creation of the self and the sacred.
About Joe Perez
