News

Emotion words in English books reflect trends in history and culture

(21 March 2013)

Trends in emotion words in 20th century books in American and British English have been identified in new research.

The research team found that American books have gradually used more mood words than British books in the last half of the 20th century, although mood words have been used less frequently overall in recent decades. Findings also point to some interesting correspondences between words in published English books and historical time periods.

The vast size of data available on book words gives researchers a unique tool for examining cultural trends. The Google books data set is comparable to physical data such as temperature, but is much greater in volume, which prevents inconsistencies or ‘noise’ conflicting with the results.

‘If you’ve got millions of books or hundreds of thousands for each year then any effects unique to a particular author or style of text become vastly reduced when compared with the whole body of data’, said Dr Garnett.

Researchers found a 'sad peak' during the Second World War in books from American and Britain and two 'happy peaks' in the 1920s and 1960s. While the frequencies of nearly all moods expressed in 20th century English books are decreasing there is one exception -- fear.

Fear experienced a decline in the early 20th century, but has increased significantly since the 1970s. In comparison, ‘disgust’ had the lowest frequency with its lowest point around 2000. Currently, the use of mood words in books is historically less frequent in America and Britain.

Despite this decrease in overall use, emotional words and phrases have gradually risen in American books since the 1960s in comparison with British English books, which researchers say roughly correlates with increases in anti-social and narcissistic words in US popular song lyrics from 1980 to 2007.