Birth of the cool: a two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction

Figures & data

Figure 1. Emotionality changes in Anglophone literature, for the Google Books corpus. The solid line represents a linear regression of the data.

Figure 2. Emotionality changes in Anglophone literature, for the two “small data” corpora. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Table 1. Predictors of emotionality: fixed effects estimates for Models 2a (Corpus A) and 2b (Corpus B).

Parameter	Estimate	Std error	Degrees of freedom	t	Sig.	95% C.I.
						Lower	Higher
Model 2a
Intercept	.176183	.027450	20.248	6.418	.000	.118968	.233397
Gender (M instead of F)	−.008387	.002147	18.593	−3.906	.001	−.012888	−.003886
Age	−.000027	.000036	167.452	−.753	.452	−.000099	.000044
Date	−.000068	.000015	19.539	−4.467	.000	−.000099	−.000036
Model 2b
Intercept	.175386	.024524	418.337	7.152	.000	.127181	.223592
Gender (M instead of F)	−.003	.000827	211.207	−3.628	.000	−.004630	.001370
Length (z-score)	.000637	.000250	397.562	2.551	.011	.000146	.001128
Date	−.00007	.000013	418.379	−5.457	.000	−.000096	−.000045

Figure 3. Emotionality changes in Anglophone literature, for the Google Books corpus. (a): negative emotions-related terms. (b): positive emotions-related terms. Solid lines represent linear regressions of the data.

Table 2. Predictors of positive emotionality: fixed effects estimates for Models 7a (corpus A) and 7b (corpus B).

Parameter	Estimate	Std error	Degrees of freedom	t	Sig.	95% C.I.
						Lower	Higher
Model 7a
Intercept	.126810	.023981	335.676	5.288	.000	.078158	.175462
Gender (M instead of F)	−.006048	.002016	20.590	−3.001	.007	−.010245	−.001852
Date	−.000051	.000013	35.514	−3.929	.000	−.000078	−.000025
Model 7b
Intercept	.141938	.019624	427.504	7.233	.000	.103365	.180510
Gender (M instead of F)	−.003061	.000672	214.690	−4.558	.000	−.004385	−.001737
Length (z-score)	.000394	.000198	398.428	1.989	.047	.000005	.0000783
Date	−.00006	.000010	427.554	−4.234	.000	−.000081	−.000040

Table 3. Predictors of negative emotionality: fixed effect estimates for Models 10a (corpus A) and 10b (corpus B).

Parameter	Estimate	Std error	Degrees of freedom	t	Sig.	95% C.I.
						Lower	Higher
Model 10a
Intercept	.045284	.013990	18.864	3.237	.004	.015988	.074579
Gender (M instead of F)	−.02228	.001098	17.112	−2.030	.058	−.000030	.000003
Age	−.000062	.000018	160.486	−3.530	.001	−.000097	−.000027
Date	−.000013	.000008	18.259	−1.743	.098	−.000030	.000003
Model 10b
Intercept	.026614	.014290	376.766	1.862	.063	−.001484	.054712
Length	.000322	.000153	428.872	2.111	.035	.000022	.000623
Age	−.000017	.000009	303.929	−1.924	.055	−.000034	.000000
Date	−.000006	.000006	374.782	−.820	.413	−.000021	.000009

Figure 4. Emotionality changes in six additional Google Books corpora. (a) British English (texts in English language published in Great Britain). (b) French. (c) German. (d) Italian. (e) Russian. (f) Spanish. Solid lines represent linear regressions of the data. See Supplementary materials 5 for details of the analysis.