ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Linguistic positivity in historical texts reflects dynamic environmental and psychological factors.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- The Valence of Abstraction: A Paradox Revisited.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2024Article
- Tone in politics is not systematically related to macro trends, ideology, or experience.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Valence norms for 3,600 English words collected during the COVID-19 pandemic: Effects of age and the pandemic.Behavior research methods · 2022Article
- How to Develop Reliable Instruments to Measure the Cultural Evolution of Preferences and Feelings in History?Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Has Psychology Become More Positive? Trends in Language Use in Article Abstracts.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The rise and fall of rationality in language.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Reply to Schmidt et al.: A robust surge of cognitive distortions in historical language.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Natural Language Analysis and the Psychology of Verbal Behavior: The Past, Present, and Future States of the Field.Journal of language and social psychology · 2021Article
- The rise of prosociality in fiction preceded democratic revolutions in Early Modern Europe.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Will Emotional Effects Modulate L2 Lexical Attrition as they Do in L2 Acquisition?Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2020Article
- Could L2 Lexical Attrition Be Predicted in the Dimension of Valence, Arousal, and Dominance?Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Developing and validating the self-transcendent emotion dictionary for text analysis.PloS one · 2020Article
- Collective Emotions and Social Resilience in the Digital Traces After a Terrorist Attack.Psychological science · 2019Article
- Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics.Evolutionary human sciences · 2019Article
- Mental profile mapping: A psychological single-candidate authorship attribution method.PloS one · 2018Article
- How Will We React to the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life?Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
People use more positive words than negative words. Referred to as "linguistic positivity bias" (LPB), this effect has been found across cultures and languages, prompting the conclusion that it is a panhuman tendency. However, although multiple competing explanations of LPB have been proposed, there is still no consensus on what mechanism(s) generate LPB or even on whether it is driven primarily by universal cognitive features or by environmental factors. In this work we propose that LPB has remained unresolved because previous research has neglected an essential dimension of language: time. In four studies conducted with two independent, time-stamped text corpora (Google books Ngrams and the New York Times), we found that LPB in American English has decreased during the last two centuries. We also observed dynamic fluctuations in LPB that were predicted by changes in objective environment, i.e., war and economic hardships, and by changes in national subjective happiness. In addition to providing evidence that LPB is a dynamic phenomenon, these results suggest that cognitive mechanisms alone cannot account for the observed dynamic fluctuations in LPB. At the least, LPB likely arises from multiple interacting mechanisms involving subjective, objective, and societal factors. In addition to having theoretical significance, our results demonstrate the value of newly available data sources in addressing long-standing scientific questions.
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