Human Language Innately Positive, With Spanish Being the Most "Feliz"
If you are happy and you want to show, just talk, researchers say. For, language is loaded for positivity.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) proves decades-old hypothesis that language is biased towards happiness. Called the Pollyanna hypothesis, it was formulated in 1969 and contended that language is biased towards communication of positive emotions, LA Times reported. To test the hypothesis, researchers examined 10 languages in a Big Data study and found that people use more positive words than negative ones.
As part of the study researchers collected 10,000 most frequently used words from various sources including books, websites, news outlets, social media, television and even movie subtitles. English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic were 10 languages examined.
They then got native speakers to rate each of the words on a 1 to 10 scale of happiness.
"We looked at ten languages and in every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones," says Peter Dodds at University of Vermont, the study's co-author, in a news release.
Among the languages, Spanish had the highest average happiness and Chinese the lowest, Discovery News reported.
The researchers wrote in the journal that their work can now be used as a device to measure happiness itself from text. An instance of such was on the day of Charlie Hebdo attacks where Twitter English posts reflected a decline in happiness quotient which climbed three days later.
