The expression of emotions in 20th century books

PLoS One. 2013;8(3):e59030. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059030. Epub 2013 Mar 20.

Abstract

We report here trends in the usage of "mood" words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-related words through time. Finally, we show that, in books, American English has become decidedly more "emotional" than British English in the last half-century, as a part of a more general increase of the stylistic divergence between the two variants of English language.

Publication types

  • Historical Article
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Affect
  • Books* / history
  • Emotions*
  • History, 20th Century
  • Humans
  • Language / history

Grants and funding

This research was partially supported by the Leverhulme Trust "Tipping Points" program. A. Acerbi was initially supported by the "Uniquely Human" project funded by the Swedish Research Council, and then by a Newton International Fellowship. V. Lampos acknowledges the support from the TrendMiner project (EU-FP7-ICT n.287863). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.