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  • ... naturally optimistic

    "Nulla tenaci..." doesn't always suggest happiness so directly. But a recent study found out, that all languages skew toward happiness: Universal human bias for positive words. (source) This graph shows distributions of perceived average word happiness from 24 sources in ten languages. Spanish is most skewed toward the positive and Chinese books the least--but all sources showed the same trend: humans tend to look on, and talk about, the bright side of life. The yellow and blue graphs, called histograms, each represent the 5000 most commonly used words from each source; yellow indicates positivity; blue indicates negativity.
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    Last edited by amzamz; 10-02-2015, 11:47.

  • #2
    Originally posted by amzamz View Post
    "Nulla tenaci..." doesn't always suggest happiness so directly. But a recent study found out, that all languages skew toward happiness: Universal human bias for positive words. (source) This graph shows distributions of perceived average word happiness from 24 sources in ten languages. Spanish is most skewed toward the positive and Chinese books the least--but all sources showed the same trend: humans tend to look on, and talk about, the bright side of life. The yellow and blue graphs, called histograms, each represent the 5000 most commonly used words from each source; yellow indicates positivity; blue indicates negativity.
    Interesting; but I can't easily decipher the chart - is it a distribution of the top 5000 words? In which case what is the X-axis - degree of negativity?
    And I think I would debate the sources as being representative of language, either spoken or read...!! Mostly because i do not use twitter or google books, and song lyrics are contrived to fit the melody. In fact I'd say most songs are miserable, even if the component words are positive?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by mrobin33 View Post
      Interesting; but I can't easily decipher the chart - is it a distribution of the top 5000 words? In which case what is the X-axis - degree of negativity?
      And I think I would debate the sources as being representative of language, either spoken or read...!! Mostly because i do not use twitter or google books, and song lyrics are contrived to fit the melody. In fact I'd say most songs are miserable, even if the component words are positive?
      If the length of the intervals on the "x-axis" are all 1, then a histogram is identical to a relative frequency plot. However, histograms are usually not depicted in terms of an X by Y axis plot in that a histogram is an estimate of the probability distribution of a continuous variable.

      And although Paul Simon said that he always composes the music and then writes the lyrics, I prefer to write the lyrics and structure the music accordingly, whether the message derived therefrom is "positive" or "negative". However, the fact that I write the lyrics first does not preclude any of my compositions from being mundane, or even plebeian in nature.
      Last edited by Scott Triplitt; 14-02-2015, 09:39.
      Scott

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