Biases in use of positive and negative words across twenty natural languages

Abstract

Positive events are more common (more tokens), but negative events are more differentiated (more types). These observations and asymmetries about the world are consistent with a number of features or biases favouring positive adjectives that have been shown for English. Compared to their opposites, positive adjectives in English are more likely to be unmarked, negated into their opposite, define the entire negative to positive dimension, and occur first in conjunctions with their negative opposite. In this paper we document that these biases have considerable generality, appearing in all or almost all of 20 natural languages. The greater differentiation of negative states is illustrated here by the demonstration that five common nouns describing negative states in English (disgust, risk, sympathy, accident, murderer) have equivalents in most or all of the 20 languages surveyed, but the opposite of these nouns is not lexicalised in most of the 20 languages.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Language
• Valence
• Biases
• Negativity

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by funds from the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair for Faculty Excellence in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Notes

¹The Leech et al. (2001) database does not report frequencies below 10 in 1,000,000 words. Hence, “0” actually stands for less than 10/1,000,000.

²An argument can be made that the observations that we report are not truly independent; that is, the 20 languages are related to some extent, but we treat them as independent for the purpose of computing and interpreting the chi-square. Also, note that we are not including English in the 20 languages, since we used English to select the instances. Nonetheless, English is a positive supporting instance in each case.