Positivity of the English language

TL;DR

This study analyzes the emotional bias in English language, revealing a consistent positive bias in the perceived positivity of frequently used words across multiple corpora.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale quantitative analysis of positivity bias in natural language, demonstrating invariance across different corpora and word frequencies.

Findings

Most common English words are perceived as positively biased.

Positivity distribution remains consistent across different text corpora.

The positivity bias is invariant with respect to word frequency.

Abstract

Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and contingent questions: (1) What is the emotional spectrum of natural language? and (2) Are natural languages neutrally, positively, or negatively biased? Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias. More deeply, we characterize and quantify distributions of word positivity for four large and distinct corpora, demonstrating that their form is broadly invariant with respect to frequency of word use.