What is happening to our feelings?

Emotional language on the decline over the last century

My six year old son came back from the school playground the other day, his T shirt stretched to twice it's size, hair ruffled, a scratch bruise on his cheek and tears in his eyes. My wife and I had been in the kitchen prepping dinner over some banal conversation. Seeing him in this state, his mom (as most mom's would ) shrieked, rushed to side, held him firmly by his arms and asked what had happened. Eyes now welling up with tears he muffled something about getting into a disagreement with a friend and then fighting it out to settle it.



My wife now much calmer realizing that it was nothing dangerous began her advice spiel, explaining how it was not right to fight, and that he should have instead settled the matter by talking it out. The main theme being - "Tell him how you feel about it."

How often have we all had that conversation. To settle things by talking it out, by talking about your feelings and emotions. Even at the most vulnerable of places, the psychiatrist couch, to dig deep and see how you really feel, to try and understand what that feeling is saying.

But despite all this sage advice, fights still continue around the world and the psychiatrist couch remains a busy place as ever.

Does this all mean we're all loosing it? or is this just a sign of the times. Are we loosing touch of our basic human emotions. Are we desensitizing?

In a new study launched using digitized books from Google, researchers found that emotional language is on the decline over the last century. This split seems to have occurred in the 1960s. The researchers looked at how frequently "mood" words were used through time in a database of more than 5 million digitized books provided by Google. The study also found that the American English has more of these "feelings" words than the British English.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

The list of words was divided into six categories (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) previously used by a co-author Vasileios Lampos, from the University of Sheffield’s department of computer science and the Natural Language Processing Group, to detect contemporary mood changes in public opinion as expressed in tweets collected in the UK over more than two years.

Other than fear, words about emotions have steadily decreased in books throughout the last century, say researchers. It was interesting to note how well periods of positive and negative moods correlated with historical events. The Second World War, for example, was marked by a distinct increase of words related to sadness, and a correspondent decrease of words related to joy.

Co-author Professor Alex Bentley says: “We don’t know exactly what happened in the sixties but our results show that this is the precise moment in which literary American and British English started to diverge. We can only speculate whether this was connected, for example, to the baby-boom or to the rising of counterculture. “In the USA, baby boomers grew up in the greatest period of economic prosperity of the century, whereas the British baby boomers grew up in a post-war recovery period so perhaps ‘emotionalism’ was a luxury of economic growth.”

While the trends found in this study are very clear, their interpretation is still open. “A remaining question,” the authors say, “is whether word usage represents real behavior in a population, or possibly an absence of that behavior which is increasingly played out via literary fiction. Books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body.”

Click here for the link to the full article.