Sunday Times 2
Why English language pop music will leave you feeling blue
Mathematicians have confirmed what fans of Adele, Radiohead and Lana del Ray may already suspect – that English language song lyrics are one of the most depressing forms of writing on the planet.
A study has found that English-spoken song lyrics are more miserable than Russian literature, which has brought us less-than-cheery classic novels such as Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment.
Despite noting the unhappiness of English language pop lyrics, overall, the study concluded that human language as a whole is positive. (Pictured) Lana Del Rey's first album was titled 'Born to Die'
Only Chinese novels and Korean film subtitles – which can be full of violence and gothic themes – were ranked less happy than English song lyrics.
A random sample of English language lyrics ranked 22nd for ‘happiness’ out of 24 categories in different languages.
However, overall, the study concluded that human language as a whole is positive.
In 1969, two psychologists proposed the Pollyanna Hypothesis – the idea that there is a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently than negative ones, so that humans think, and talk, on the bright side of life.
Since then, scientists have investigated whether the idea is true.
A team of scientists at the University of Vermont used a vast data set made up of many billions of words to confirm the 1960s guess.
They gathered billions of words from around the world using 24 types of sources including books, news outlets, social media, websites, television and film subtitles, and music lyrics.
Mathematician Chris Danforth said: ‘We collected roughly 100 billion words written in tweets.’
From these sources, the team then identified about 10,000 of the most frequently used words in each of 10 languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic.
Analysing a random sample of words from Arabic film subtitles, Twitter feeds in Korean, the famously dark literature of Russia, books in Chinese, music lyrics in English, and even the war-torn pages of The New York Times, they found the types of writing – and probably all human language, is skewed towards the use of happy words.
Mathematician and co-leader of the study, Peter Dodds looked at 10 languages and found ‘in every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones.’
Despite violent films and miserable song lyrics, he said that ‘positive social interaction’ is built into global languages’ fundamental structure.
The scientists also asked native speakers of the languages to rate words according to how positive or negative they find them. The results were published in the journal PNAS.
From these speakers, they gathered five million individual human scores of the words, with laughter scoring 8.5, for example, and terrorist, 1.3.
Once all of these words were plotted, the researchers found that every language studied was inherently positive, and more words scored higher than five.
Over all, Spanish was found to be the happiest language, and English took third place, behind Portuguese.
A search of Chinese books had the lowest ‘average word happiness,’ but all 24 sources of words scored on average above the average happiness score of five, including song lyrics.
When the team translated words between languages and then back again they found that ‘the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages.’
‘Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language,’ the mathematicians wrote in the study.
‘The words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use.’
The scientists also built a computer programme called the hedometer, which was named after the Greek words for pleasure and gauge , to track levels of happiness in language over time, for example on Twitter.
They found that over the past year, English speaking Twitter users used the most positive language on Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and Thanksgiving, and used the most unhappy language to talk about the death of Robin Williams, Charlie Hedbo attacks and the Ferguson protests.
The tool was also used to analyse the high and low points of 10,000 books to show that Moby Dick is an emotionally turbulent novel and that the Count of Monte Christo ends on a jubilant note.
Language used in Crime and Punishment was predominantly positive but ended on a very low point.
© Daily Mail, London