Both marketing and publishing seek to reach consumers’ emotions. So we found the following research to be interesting.
NPR reporter on psychology, emotion, and the business of emotion, Alix Spiegel (@aspiegelnpr), investigated how British anthropologists used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century — close to a billion words in millions of books. And not just novels or current event books. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides.
This effort began simply with lists of "emotion" words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research.
The original idea was to have the computer program track the use of these words over time. The researchers wanted to see if certain words, at certain moments, became more popular.
With the graphs spread out in front of him, Bentley says the patterns are easy to see. "The twenties were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring."
But then there came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that peaks and valleys like these roughly mirror the major economic and social events of the century.
"In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bently says.
But words that express emotion are being used less today (except fear-related words).
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