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The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

Acerbi, A; Lampos, V; Garnett, P; Bentley, RA; (2013) The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books. PLoS ONE , 8 (3) , Article e59030. 10.1371/journal.pone.0059030. Green open access

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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.

Type: Article
Title: The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059030
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059030
Language: English
Additional information: © 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.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1415823
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