Affective biases in English are bi-dimensional

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Affective Science
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• The Pollyanna hypothesis suggests humans have an optimistic outlook, evidenced by more frequent use of positive words.
• Prior research has not fully explored the nuances of word distribution across emotional dimensions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To re-evaluate the Pollyanna hypothesis using extensive affective ratings and linguistic data.
• To investigate the role of valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity) in word usage.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of the largest available collection of affective word ratings.
• Application of linguistic insights to examine word distribution in a bi-dimensional affective space.
• Distinction between word types (lexical entries) and word tokens (occurrences).

Main Results:

• Identified systematic patterns in word distribution that contradict previous findings.
• Demonstrated significant differences in affective word distribution between word types and word tokens.
• Observed that word token distributions deviate from expectations based on word type.

Conclusions:

• The Pollyanna hypothesis, as previously understood, is superseded by more complex patterns.
• Pro-social communication strategies and the structure of subjective affective perception significantly shape affect in language and society.
• Affective language use is influenced by both the inherent properties of words and their frequency of use.