REAL LIFE NEWS: MOST PEOPLE ARE OPTIMISTS
by Hazed
Always look on the bright side of life, as the song goes.* It turns out that by and large, most people do – at least if you look at the language and words they use.
A “big data” study conducted by the University of Vermont looked at billions of words across a number of languages and concluded that: “probably all human language skews toward the use of happy words.” Peter Dodds, University of Vermont mathematician and co-lead of the study, said: “In every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones.”
The team identified the 10,000 most frequently used words in English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic. Then they asked native speakers to rate the words on a nine-point scale from a broadly smiling face to a deeply frowny one.
The result? We use more happy words than sad words.
Isn’t that nice!
* The song closes the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and here it is on YouTube.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/10/humans_are_hardwired_to_use_happy_words_research/