Top Stories - Posted by Amy Stone-Sheffield on Friday, March 22, 2013 6:22 - 6 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Books contain fewer words about feelings
Using digitized books from Google, the researchers found that emotional language is on the decline over the last century, and that American English has more of these "feelings" words than British English does. This split seems to have occurred in the 1960s. (Credit: kurichan+/Flickr)
U. SHEFFIELD (UK) — Other than fear, words about emotions have steadily decreased in books throughout the last century, say researchers.
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As reported in PLOS ONE, the researchers looked at how frequently “mood” words were used through time in a database of more than five million digitized books provided by Google.
The list of words was divided into six categories (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) previously used by a co-author Vasileios Lampos, from the University of Sheffield’s department of computer science and the Natural Language Processing Group, to detect contemporary mood changes in public opinion as expressed in tweets collected in the UK over more than two years.
“The initial idea was simple: what if we apply a similar analysis on digitized books? And even the very first experimental results were depicting clear patterns of correlation between historical events and mood tendencies, such as the obvious peak in sadness during the Second World War,” says Lampos.
Lead author Alberto Acerbi of the department of archaeology and anthropology at the University of Bristol, says: “We thought that it would be interesting to apply the same methodology to different media and, especially, on a larger time scale.
“We were initially surprised to see how well periods of positive and negative moods correlated with historical events. The Second World War, for example, is marked by a distinct increase of words related to sadness, and a correspondent decrease of words related to joy.”
Fear’s comeback
In applying this technique, the researchers made some remarkable discoveries about the evolution of words usage in English books over the past century.
First, the emotional content of published English has been steadily decreasing over the past century, with the exception of words associated with fear, an emotion that has resurged over the past decades.
They also found that American English and British English have undergone a distinct stylistic divergence since the 1960s. American English has become decidedly more “emotional” than British English in the last half-century.
The same divergence was also found in the use of content-free words, that is words that carry little or no meaning on their own, such as conjunctions (“and,” “but”) and articles (“the”).
“This is particularly fascinating because it has recently been shown that differences in usage of content-free words are a signature of different stylistic periods in the history of western literature,” says Acerbi.
This suggests that the divergence in emotional content between the two forms of English is paired by a more general stylistic divergence.
Is emotion a luxury?
Co-author Professor Alex Bentley says: “We don’t know exactly what happened in the sixties but our results show that this is the precise moment in which literary American and British English started to diverge. We can only speculate whether this was connected, for example, to the baby-boom or to the rising of counterculture.
“In the USA, baby boomers grew up in the greatest period of economic prosperity of the century, whereas the British baby boomers grew up in a post-war recovery period so perhaps ‘emotionalism’ was a luxury of economic growth.”
While the trends found in this study are very clear, their interpretation is still open.
“A remaining question,” the authors say, “is whether word usage represents real behavior in a population, or possibly an absence of that behavior which is increasingly played out via literary fiction. Books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body.”
“Today we have tools that are revolutionizing our understanding of human culture and of how it changes through time,” says Acerbi. “Interdisciplinary studies such as this one can detect clear patterns by looking at an unprecedented amount of data, such as tweets, Google trends, blogs, or, in our case, digitized books, that are freely available to everyone interested in them.”
Source: University of Sheffield
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6 Comments
Katharine Nair
Kristine Francis
Katherine, I agree; dialogue and description can be more than adequate. I wonder what words were targeted in the count. For example, there are many indicators for fear: afraid, scared, terrified, petrified, dread, alarm, etc. But if we read that “his head was filled with the sound of his heart pounding, and his hands trembled uncontrollably on the cold, crumbling stone walls, grasping for anything dry and solid, as he tried to back out of the tunnel” we don’t need a name for the guy’s emotion. The writer is showing us, not telling us.
The Happy Quibbler
In my view, literature which relies more heavily on dialog can hardly be said to be more subtle. It seems that there is a limit to how subtle dialog could become before it became unrealistic, not that this is a necessity of good literature. On the other hand, if narrative is dying a slow death, then I would suggest that so is literature.
All the emotionalism has moved into romance novels, soap operas, and Oprah Winfrey’s program. I wonder what books were targeted in the project. The trend toward action thrillers, war movies, horror films and their concomitant print literature has moved the feely needle into the harder, more brutal region of the spectrum. The smarmy sentimentality of the 1950s got replaced by a parallel shift in the general culture thanks to the Korean and Vietnam wars and the descending spiral of Zeitgeist into every other kind of social “war”–on drugs, on terror, on hunger, on women, on crime, on political incorrectness.
All the emotional dysfunctionals have enriched the psychiatric profession and the anti-depressant manufacturers. Our creatives in the arts–whether literature, fine art, film, comic books, comedy, music, etc.–reflect and reinforce the darkening mood. It’s a recursive, self-propagating cycle. The emerging selfishness and snarkiness of the “me” generation have driven empathy and sensitivity out of fashion. The ironic backlash of that is where people now have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook! It is undeniable that people’s actions reflect their feelings, and their feelings reflect their values, and the values they hold reflect the culture’s dominant memes. That’s my theory. If you don’t like it, I have others.
E
He chuckled bemusedly at the comments, most of all Kate’s comment, and at the study article itself. Kate was probably right, he thought, in her guesses as to the reasons of the disappearance of introspecting on emotion.
He began to wonder if anyone had ever written a chapter or short story as he had, with two lines of dialog in an entire conversation, the rest being muted and left for the reader to imagine; while the emotions and thoughts of the participants were described in detail. Still, all the comments left him wondering if anyone had noticed one thing left undefined by the language of the study, that being the variety of words rather than the quantity. Considering his own perusals of Austen and Tolstoy, vocabulary has been on an immense decline for far longer than the study was guessing, with a few notable exceptions of specific authors.
One does have to remember though, he thought with a chuckle, that the average cat has almost as extensive a vocabulary as the average high school dropout. Should he share his thoughts, he wondered, then decided not to, because his words too would probably just get left ignored on the internet until someone parsed it with a word counter. Then he clicked the mouse button in the wrong place. Momentarily he was startled, but remembered that it doesn’t really matter because nobody will bother to read it anyway, and shrugging impassively closed the window.
Mark
Thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful comments.
I’m reluctant to agree with interpretations based on either the improvement or declines of either literature or morality over time. I am old enough to clearly remember the 1950s and 1960s, and it is hard to evaluate, objectively, which is better — then or now. I personally like the present better, but that proves nothing.
From at least 1900 through the 1950s, I believe there was a great emphasis on personal character both in literature and in society in general. That is part of the explanation, I think, why emotion words appeared so often. Much literature had to do with personal struggles to achieve moral goodness as well as with moral criticism of others.
Are we better people now? People then were stricter and more judgmental in their expectations of others, but also held high expectations for themselves. On the other hand, some of the old morality seems arbitrary of wrong. Certainly racism was far worse and some of the old requirements for personal behavior seem arbitrary or wrong..
If i have to guess — and it is only a guess — now is better than then: so long as we don’t destroy ourselves.
I wonder if the people doing this study are readers. Modern fiction relies much more heavily on dialog than in the past. Emotions are there, but they must be inferred. This is more subtle writing than past styles which laid out emotion explicitly.