According to a recent study, the recent worldwide scandals involving famine and war hasn’t diminished the inner optimistic vibe of the human race. According to a recent study that encompassed millions of words written in newspapers or posted online, the majority of human communication is positive.
The research was published in the journal PNAS on Monday.
The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Vermont and The MITRE Corporation They collected, studied and analysed billions of words as well as their frequency rate from a wide variety of texts, such as literature, music lyrics, movie subtitles, social media or newspapers. They analysed social platforms such as Twitter, newspapers such as the New York Times, as well as the Google Books Project and Google’s Web Crawl.
They focused on 10,000 most frequently use words in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Brazilian,Chinese, Korean, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic.
“We looked at 10 languages. And in every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones,”
said Peter Dodds, an University of Vermont mathematician.
The scientists paid native speakers of the 10 languages investigated in order to rate how they felt regarding each of those words on a 9-point scale. 1 was the most negative or saddest interpretation, 5 was neutral, and 9 was the most positive or happiest.For each word, they collected 50 ratings from the native speakers.
For instance in English, “laughter” scored 8.5, “food” scored 7.4, while “terrorist” scored 1.3.
This matter was first looked into back in 1969, when two psychologists from the University of Illinois came up with a hypothesis they called the Pollyanna Hypothesis, according to which there is a universal and natural human tendency regarding the use of positive words much more often than negative ones.
The new team of scientists wanted to come up with something to support the 1969 theory that has caused tremendous debate ever since. They were supported in their research by the US National Science Foundation and the non-profit Mitre Corporation, too.
The researchers concluded that despite most people having negative thoughts running through their minds all the time, they don’t really express those on a regular basis. The universal speech pattern in widely positive. And since language is the reflection of our true nature, they concluded that humans as a specie are solar and positive beings.
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