Human language is skewed towards the use of happy words, an analysis of 10 different languages used in everything from Arabic movie subtitles, Korean tweets and Russian novels to Chinese websites and English lyrics has found.
Humans evolved to look on the bright side of life, and this ‘positivity bias’ has been built into our language, the results of a massive examination of the words used in 10 different languages has shown.
The basis of this research harkens back to 1969, when two psychologists at the University of Illinois came up with the so-called Pollyanna Hypothesis - that humans universally tend to skew their use of language towards happy words, rather than negative ones. "Put even more simply,” the pair wrote, "humans tend to look on (and talk about) the bright side of life.” But this was just an hypothesis, they had little evidence to back it up, and it has inspired heated debate ever since.
Humans evolved to look on the bright side of life, and this ‘positivity bias’ has been built into our language, the results of a massive examination of the words used in 10 different languages has shown.
The basis of this research harkens back to 1969, when two psychologists at the University of Illinois came up with the so-called Pollyanna Hypothesis - that humans universally tend to skew their use of language towards happy words, rather than negative ones. "Put even more simply,” the pair wrote, "humans tend to look on (and talk about) the bright side of life.” But this was just an hypothesis, they had little evidence to back it up, and it has inspired heated debate ever since.
