A study has discovered peaks and valleys of emotion during the 20th century. "Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad?"
asked National Public Radio (NPR) in early April when reporting about a study that examined the use of "emotion" words in 20th century literature. According to NPR's Mining Books to Map Emotions Through a Century by Alix Spiegel, the study used a dataset from Google books. The high point of joy was found in the 1920's. The low point was in the early 1940's during WWII. The pattern can be seen in a chart from the study that was republished in the NPR story.
The study's authors discovered more than peaks and valleys.
"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."
To see and learn more, read the original article:
Acerbi A, Lampos V, Garnett P, Bentley RA (2013) The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books. PLoS ONE 8(3): e59030. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0059030
