Researchers determined most languages skew towards the use of happy words.
In the 1960s two psychologists at the University of Illinois came up with the Pollyanna Hypothesis, which suggests humans tend to favor positive words and to look towards the "bright side of life," the University of Vermont reported. A modern team of researchers decided to take a Big Data approach to proving this theory.
"We looked at 10 languages," said UVM mathematician Peter Dodds, who co-led the study, "and in every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones."
The researchers gathered billions of words from around the world from "books, news outlets, social media, websites, television and movie subtitles, and music lyrics." They identified about 10,000 of the most frequently used words in "English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese (simplified), Russian, Indonesian and Arabic."
They then asked native speakers of each language to rate each word on a scale of one to nine that was also represented as a deeply frowning face to a widely smiling one.
A Google web crawl revealed Spanish had the highest average rate of happy words while Chinese had the lowest. Regardless of the language, the words were found to be skewed above the neutral score of five on their one-to-nine scale. This showed what the researchers called a "usage-invariant positivity bias" meaning we "use more happy words than sad words," said UVM mathematician Chris Danforth who co-led the new research.
The team also developed "physical-like instruments" for measurements of happiness in large-scale texts; they've called this instrument the "hedonometer." The tool can scour social media sites like Twitter to trace global happiness. It found that there was a big drop in happiness in the English language the day of the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The meter has also determined that Vermont currently has the highest happiness signal in the U.S. while Louisiana has the saddest.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
