The expression of emotions in 20th century books.

We report here trends in the usage of "mood" words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinc...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Alberto Acerbi, Vasileios Lampos, Philip Garnett, R Alexander Bentley
Format: article
Language:EN
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2013
Subjects:
R
Q
Online Access:https://doaj.org/article/94e9a543011045889046418e5ede3d3e
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We report here trends in the usage of "mood" words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-related words through time. Finally, we show that, in books, American English has become decidedly more "emotional" than British English in the last half-century, as a part of a more general increase of the stylistic divergence between the two variants of English language.