ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2019
Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolution of moral expression in song lyrics.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The chronospatial revolution in psychology.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Tone in politics is not systematically related to macro trends, ideology, or experience.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Lyrics do matter: how "coping songs" relate to well-being goals. The COVID pandemic case.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Misperception of peer beliefs reinforces inequitable gender norms among Tanzanian men.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- How Male and Female Literary Authors Write About Affect Across Cultures and Over Historical Periods.Affective science · 2023Article
- Large language models show human-like content biases in transmission chain experiments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Here comes the sun: music features of popular songs reflect prevailing weather conditions.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Using portraits to quantify the changes of generalized social trust in European history: A replication study.PloS one · 2023Article
- Dynamic cluster structure and predictive modelling of music creation style distributions.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- From Storytelling to Facebook : Content Biases When Retelling or Sharing a Story.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Explosive and implosive root concepts: An analysis of music moods rooted by two influential rap artists.PloS one · 2022Article
- Why are song lyrics becoming simpler? a time series analysis of lyrical complexity in six decades of American popular music.PloS one · 2021Article
- From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to "Cumulative Cultural Evolution?"Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Limited Scope for Group Coordination in Stylistic Variations ofFrontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Cultural evolution of football tactics: strategic social learning in managers' choice of formation.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Conformity bias in the cultural transmission of music sampling traditions.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Popular music offers a rich source of data that provides insights into long-term cultural evolutionary dynamics. One major trend in popular music, as well as other cultural products such as literary fiction, is an increase over time in negatively valenced emotional content, and a decrease in positively valenced emotional content. Here we use two large datasets containing lyrics from
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