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The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

Acerbi, A.; Lampos, V.; Garnett, P.; Bentley, R.A.

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Authors

A. Acerbi

V. Lampos

P. Garnett

R.A. Bentley



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.

Citation

Acerbi, A., Lampos, V., Garnett, P., & Bentley, R. (2013). The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books. PLoS ONE, 8(3), Article e59030. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059030

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 11, 2013
Online Publication Date Mar 20, 2013
Publication Date Mar 1, 2013
Deposit Date Mar 22, 2013
Publicly Available Date Aug 16, 2013
Journal PLoS ONE
Publisher Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 8
Issue 3
Article Number e59030
DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059030

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Copyright Statement
Copyright: © 2013 Acerbi et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.





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