This effect, which has also been observed in 6вЂ“12 year old children ( Sylvester et al., 2016), is usually explained with the informational density hypothesis ( Ashby and Isen, 1999 Kuchinke et al., 2005 Unkelbach et al., 2010). Such a textual positivity bias has measurable consequences for text processing and reading behavior known as the positivity superiority effect, i.e., the observation that in many word recognition tasks positive words yield faster response times than neutral or negative ones ( LГјdtke and Jacobs, 2015 for review, see Jacobs et al., 2015). Going forward, our word happiness assessments should be periodically repeated and carried out for new languages, tested on different demographics, and expanded to phrases both for the improvement of hedonometric instruments and to chart the dynamics of our collective social self.вЂќ In a similar vein, Greene(2017, p.12) found hints to a positivity bias in his summary of text analyses of the вЂњcorpus of the canon of western literatureвЂќ concluding вЂњthat even though canonical literature from Homer to Hemmingway addresses death, war, heartache and tragedy, the overall cultural preoccupations of the western canon over history have been largely positive.вЂќ We emphasize that this apparent linguistic encoding of our social nature is a system-level property, and in no way asserts all natural texts will skew positiveвЂ¦ or diminishes the salience of negative states ( Forgas, 2013). They concluded their study with: вЂњOverall, our major scientific finding is that when experienced in isolation and weighted properly according to use, words, which are the atoms of human language, present an emotional spectrum with a universal, self-similar positive bias. 6) presented extensive cross-cultural data based on large-scale macroanalytic, univariate sentiment analyses of multi-lingual text corpora that support the hypothesis. About 50 years and many technological advances later вЂ“ especially in natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics and machine learning methods вЂ“ Dodds et al.(2015, p. In 1969 Boucher and Osgood presented influential evidence for the idea that вЂњhumans tend to look on (and talk about) the bright side of lifeвЂќ and coined this phenomenon the вЂњPollyanna hypothesis,вЂќ i.e., a universal human tendency to use evaluatively positive words more frequently, diversely and facilely than evaluatively negative words 1. вЂњThe 7-year-old child is perfectly familiar with both PRETTY and UGLY but he uses the former much more frequently than the latter.вЂќ Boucher and Osgood(1969, p. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature. Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, both corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. Here we tested this prediction applying an unsupervised vector space model-based sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt ( Jacobs, 2019) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (500 books).

If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and OsgoodвЂ™s (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages ( Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect.

4Educational Psychology, University of GГ¶ttingen, GГ¶ttingen, Germany.

3Digital Humanities Lab, UniversitГ¤t Basel, Basel, Switzerland.

2Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Berlin (CCNB), Freie UniversitГ¤t Berlin, Berlin, Germany.1Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie UniversitГ¤t Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

Jacobs 1,2*, Berenike Herrmann 3, Gerhard Lauer 3, Jana LГјdtke 1,2 and Sascha Schroeder 4

The art of stillness epub