Do we prefer happiness?

Hello Everyone

Newspapers so often report those things about which we need to be afraid.  In one way that makes sense as our brains are hard wired to survival and those things that threaten survival need to be attended to as a priority over those things that keep us safe.

The research from the University of Vermont does give us some positive food for thought.   Data from their study confirms the 1969 Pollyanna Hypothesis that there is a universal human tendency to "look on and talk about the bright side of life." A massive amount of data collected - one hundred billion words written in tweets in ten languages.

Evidently research examining billions of words, shows that all human language  skews toward the use of happy words.   The research included for example such things as Arabic movie subtitles, Korean tweets, Russian novels, Chinese websites, English lyrics, Spanish Twitter, German websites, the New York Times or music lyrics in English.  All of these skew towards the use of happy words.

A Google web crawl of Spanish-language sites had the highest average word happiness, and a search of Chinese books had the lowest, but -- and here's the point -- all twenty-four sources of words that they analyzed skewed above the neutral score of five on their one-to-nine scale -- regardless of the language. In every language, neutral words like "the" scored just where you would expect: in the middle, near five. And when the team translated words between languages and then back again they found that "the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages."

The researchers found by looking at the words people actually use most often that, on average, more happy words than sad words are used.

From this research a new instrument has been developed called a hedonometer, a happiness meter. It can now trace the global happiness signal from English-language Twitter posts on a near-real-time basis, and show differing happiness signals between days. For example, a big drop was noted on the day of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, but rebounded over the following three days.

Roz Townsend  www.roztownsend.com

To read more of these ideas see Roz's latest books Future Words and Love Well available on Amazon.

Source: University of Vermont. "F-bombs notwithstanding, all languages skew toward happiness: Universal human bias for positive words." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 9 February 2015. .