The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

Alberto Acerbi; Vasileios Lampos; Philip Garnett; R. Alexander Bentley

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0059030

The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

Alberto Acerbi, Vasileios Lampos, Philip Garnett, R. Alexander Bentley

The York Management School

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-related words through time. Finally, we show that, in books, American English has become decidedly more “emotional” than British English in the last half-century, as a part of a more general increase of the stylistic divergence between the two variants of English language.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	e59030
Journal	PLoS ONE
Volume	8
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059030
Publication status	Published - 20 Mar 2013

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10.1371/journal.pone.0059030

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0059030

Cite this

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title = "The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books",

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