The positive outlook in life

is the Same in all Languages!!!

 

 

Regardless of the language you speak, people around the world use more words with positive meaning than negative words - a finding that seems to confirm the so-called “Case of Pollyanna" in psychology.

 

• The “Case of Pollyanna"

 

The case was proposed in 1969 by two American psychologists, according to which there is a universal tendency towards the most positive words.

In other words:

 

“People, always tend to see the bright side of life”, the two researchers said.

 

The case was named Pollyanna, the unfortunate but always joyous  figure of the children's novel by Elenor Porter.

It remains a popular idea, which was difficult to prove.

 

The solution is now given by the  Internet technology:

 

Researchers at the University of Vermont in US, collected billions of words from ten different languages, films subtitled in Arabic, posts to Twitter in Korean, Russian literature , websites in Chinese and song lyrics in English.

• Ten languages under the microscope

 

"We examined ten languages and we found that in all cases, there where people using more positive words than negative ones," says Peter Duds, a member of the research team that signs the publication in the journal PNAS.

 

In each of the ten languages tested (English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic) researchers identified: The Ten Thousand Most Frequently Used Words.

Then they requested volunteers to rate the emotional content of those words in their native language on a scale from one to nine. In the case of English, for example, the word "laughter" was rated with 8.50, while the word "terrorist" to 1.30.

 If people had no bias in the use of positive and negative words, the average rating of the words should be close to the average rate of five.

 

But this was not true in any case: in ten languages, the average rating ranged well above 5.

 

Especially when the researchers translated these words into other languages, their scores remained stable, indicating that "the estimated emotional content of the words is consistent between languages."

 

• Spanish is the most "happy" language!!!

 

There were also variations:

Spanish was found to be by far the most "happy" language, while the smallest deviation with positive words appeared to be Chinese.

 

The study, researchers say, not only confirms the “Case of Pollyanna” and its relationship with different languages, but also allows the automatic assessment of the emotional content to any text.

The researchers followed, for example, how the emotional tone varies in all  novel chapters in Moby Dick.

 

• The “Hedonometer"

 

They also developed an algorithm, which is called "Hedonometer", in which happiness levels are rating Twitter

posts. For example, a noticeable drop in happiness index was recorded on the day of the terrorist attack in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Three days later, however, the index had already returned to normal levels.

 

APPARENTLY, PEOPLE ALWAYS RETURN TO THEIR DISCRIMINATORY PREFERENCE IN POSITIVE WORDS.