A recent research found that human languages lean towards using positive words. The study, carried out by researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, investigated 10 languages of the world including English, French, German, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Indonesian, Korean and Portuguese.
The study located the 100,000 of the most frequently used words used frequently on TV, social media, in song lyrics, movie subtitles, websites, news outlets, books and such 24 types of sources.
The team of researchers, led by a mathematician Peter Sheridan Dodds, concluded that these languages are biased towards being happy. The study findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study also determined that some languages tend to score different, with Spanish being the happiest and Chinese being the No. 10 on the list. Chinese books scored the lowest for happiness among all study sources. Besides Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, English and Indonesian were among the top five.
Dodds explained that the team looked at ten languages and found that people tend to use more positive words than negative ones. The findings are based on 5 million individual human scores on a scale of 1–9, with the word “terrorist” scoring 1.3 and “laughter” scoring 8.5. The study also paves the way for the development of powerful real-time tools for measuring emotion.
The scientists have developed a happiness meter, or an instrument dubbed hedonometer, to trace the global happiness signal from Twitter posts on a near-real-time basis. The assessment is currently limited to English-language posts and measures differing happiness signals between days. The meter gauged a big drop on the day of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and subsequently rebounded over the next three days. Similarly, the tool can also signal different happiness levels across the U.S. states and cities.