People use more positive words even in tough times

People tend to use more positive words even in difficult times. A research team led by Peter Dodds, professor at the University of Vermont, and the MITRE Corporation, a U.S.-based intelligence security agency, released their study on the journal PNAS on Monday. The researchers analyzed movie subtitles, Twitter feeds, lyrics, and websites in 10 languages including Korean, English, Spanish and Chinese.

The research team used “big data” containing 24 documents of 10 languages, including Korean movie subtitles and Korean Twitter feeds, and chose 10,000 words that are most used in each language group. It showed each word to 1,896 people using each language and got them rate the level of happiness on a scale of one to nine. According to the report, Korean speakers gave 7.84 points to the word “love” and 1.96 to “suicide,” while “and” and “books” earned five points.

The average of the level of happiness in the 10 language group surpassed five points, according to the study. This means people use positive words more frequently than negative words. The score of the web crawl of Spanish-language sites was 6.1, which was the highest among the group. Korean subtitles had 5.41 points of happiness and Korean Twitter feeds had 5.38 points.

“The Pollyanna hypothesis is the notion that there is a universal human tendency to look at the bright side of life,” Professor Dodds said. “This is the first case that proved the hypothesis in 1969 for the first time.”