Study Finds That Happiness and Positivity are the Expressions Most Preferred by Humans

A large study was conducted by researchers on the emotional connotations of words commonly used around the world and its results reveal that joy, happiness and positivity are the most preferred by humans regardless of the language they use.

Researchers from the Computational Story Lab of the University of Vermont conducted the study wherein they looked into 100,000 frequently used words around the world, mostly used in movie titles, the New York Times, in lyrics of various songs, on TV and on Twitter. Various mathematicians, linguists and several other scientists who took part in the study also used the Web Crawl of Google as well as Google Books Project.

Method used

The leader of the international group of researchers was Peter Sheridan Dodds. What they did was to have five million native speakers of the languages they have identified to rank the words they have selected using a nine-point emotional scale, with nine being the happiest or the most positive and one being the lowest, saddest or the most negative. Number five is a neutral level. Dodds, who is a mathematician, explained that in every source they have studied, people were prone to use positive words more often.

This is the largest study that has ever been conducted to test the Pollyanna Hypothesis, which proposes that the language used by humans reflects positivity because humans take pleasure in transmitting thoughts and feelings to each other. This hypothesis was put forth in 1969 by University of Illinois psychologists. Another group of researchers from the same university added to the initial hypothesis in 1978 by proposing that it takes people longer to recognize terms that are unpleasant. Likewise the scientists said that people tend to recall events in the past more positively than what actually occurred.

Results of the study

They also found out that out of the 10 languages they studied, there are also languages that were considered the happiest and ranking them from one to five. These are:

1. Spanish
2. Brazilian Portuguese
3. English
4. German
5. French

Languages that ranked at the bottom half, from 6th to 10th place include:

6. Indonesian
7. Russian
8. Arabic
9. Korean
10. Chinese

Among the data collected were indications of some locales that are equally ranked as the happiest or the saddest. In the United States, Vermont is considered as the happiest state, according to the study, while Boulder, Colorado is the happiest city. In last place was Racine, Wisconsin.

In the English language, “laughter” was among the words in the top-rated list. It earned a score of 8.5, while “food” got 7.44. The word “greed” on the other hand got a 3.06 mark. Words that got the lowest score included the word “terrorist,” which received a 1.30 score.

Although their study looks like it confirms that the Pollyanna Hypothesis is correct, the researchers and authors of the study say that this would only be confirmed if the words are used to convey emotions truthfully.

The new study has been published just this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ journal.

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