New Study Shows The Words We Use Actually Reflect Our Awful Reality

During and after the often-agonizing election season that recently left the United States in shreds, many Americans found themselves overwhelmed by negative, insulting, and pessimistic language on social media and around the internet. Or so it seems, at least. Past studies have found that people have a tendency to use more positive-inflected words than negative ones ― “fantastic” rather than “awful,” for example ― a trend that linguists refer to as “positive linguistic bias.”  Does our proportion of optimistic versus pessimistic verbiage actually change as our circumstances change, or are we set in our ways? A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that awful circumstances arising may lead people to use more negative words than before.  The study found that throughout the time span covered by the study, positive linguistic bias showed fluctuations “predicted by changes in objective environment, i.e., war and economic hardships, and by changes in national subjective happiness.” Is there a new Lexus in every driveway? The national conversation might be sound more chipper than it would during a grinding recession.  One of the paper’s authors, University of Southern California professor Morteza Dehghani, told the New York Times that while positive linguistic bias has been repeatedly demonstrated in studies, “What people haven’t actually looked at is ho...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news