We mightbe toldthat life expectancy is come up , poorness and disease are falling , and that even criminal offence and furiousness are on the decline , but it ’s unwashed to feel the world is get down worse , and not just this year . Why else would people vote to restore preceding wideness ? lingual analytic thinking intimate that these perceptions are creeping into Americans ' language , and the trend has been going on for two centuries .
Linguists have noticed that , across many languages , mass apply more words with positive associations than electronegative ones . The phenomenon was initially dubbed the “ Pollyanna supposition ” , based on the theory that it indicated a tendency to look on the bright side of life , but it ’s now been renamed the “ Linguistic Positivity Bias ” or LPB .
In theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , a team led byDr Rumen Ilievof the University of Michigan adjudicate to prove if the strength of LPB is affected by external conditions . A excerption of 907 word were classified as positive ( examples throw include “ clever ” , “ convinced ” , and “ grace ” ) or negative ( “ fear ” , “ hate ” , “ grief ” ) . The writer then examined Google Books ' 1.3 million titles publish by Americans between 1800 and 2000 , seek the routine of time words from each category appeared . standardized analysis was applied to issuing of the New York Times from 1851 to 2015 .
Google Books ' proportion fall from almost 2:1 to 1.6:1 , and the trend in the Times was in the same counselling , albeit much less steep .
If the trend had been consistent , this might simply indicate linguistic changes unrelated to the internal humour , so Iliev sought out more scant - condition wiggles in the data , test what happened in multiplication of national crisis such as economical depression or warfare .
The Civil War and both World Wars were affiliate with sharp drops in the LPB in both books and newspaper , indicating that LPB really does measure general humor . A imperfect connexion was seen with economic weather condition .
If the LPB strike in voiceless meter , what does it mean when the recollective - terminal figure trend is so clearly down ? Such a question is beyond the background of Iliev ’s paper , but opinion poll asking people to assess their subjective happiness have been conducted since 1946 , and these too show a correlation coefficient with the LPB .
Nevertheless , the last few days of the 20th hundred visit a small convalescence among the playscript Google has made available , and the New York Times database suggests that this may have continued in late time ( a dip possibly associate with 9/11 aside ) .
As the first published written report to consider LPB modify with metre , the paper open up up the chance for standardized research on other countries to see if growing pessimism is a uniquely American characteristic .
