Our world has become more sober and less exuberant

From Birth of the cool: a two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction by Olivier Morin and Alberto Acerbi.

Morin and Acerbi are using the big data of Google Books to identify patterns in written communication. In this iteration, they address a number of critiques of earlier work, primarily in order to validate the utility of the Google Books corpus. From the abstract:

The presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality (such as demographic dynamics concerning age or gender balance, changes in vocabulary richness, or changes in the prevalence of literary genres), and that, in our three corpora, the decrease is driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little if any decline. Consistently with previous studies, we also find a link between ageing and negative emotionality at the individual level.

They elaborate on their findings.

We report four main findings. (i) Our data confirm that the decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature is no artefact of the Google Books corpus, and that it pre-dates the twentieth century, plausibly beginning in the early nineteenth century; (ii) this general decline cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality (such as demographic dynamics concerning age or gender balance, changes in vocabulary richness, or changes in the prevalence of literary genres); (iii) in our three corpora, this decrease in the proportion of emotion-related words in literary texts is driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little decline (if any), and (iv) author’s age, consistently with previous studies (Pennebaker & Stone, 2003 Pennebaker), covaries with negative emotionality, with older authors using proportionally fewer negative emotion-related words.

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The authors rule out changes in genre as cause of the decline in positivity. They also rule out possible issues to do with whether the Google Books corpus is randomly representative. They also rule out the author's age as a possible cause. They note:

The fall of positive emotionality is all the more puzzling since life does not seem to have gotten worse, in English-speaking countries, in the last two centuries. The opposite would seem more likely: material conditions of life got better by an order of magnitude (Clark, 2009 Clark, G. (2009). A farewell to alms: A brief economic history of the world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Subjective well-being is notoriously difficult to measure, but the little data we have shows no decrease in self-reported happiness and life satisfaction, whenever it has been measured: in the USA between 1946 and 2004, or in Western Europe between 1973 and 2004 (Veenhoven & Hagerty, 2006 Veenhoven, R., & Hagerty, M. (2006). Rising happiness in nations 1946–2004: A reply to Easterlin). We also note that the decline of positive emotionality is not matched by a comparable rise of negative emotional expression in any of our corpora. While an analysis similar to the one we presented here could detect the presence of distinct periods of positive and negative “mood” in published literature, correlated with socio-economic events (Bentley, Acerbi, Ormerod, & Lampos, 2014), the extent to which positive emotionality correlates with subjective well-being is still a moot issue (Tov et al., 2013). The general trend that appears clearly is that the tone of fiction literature became less cheerful over time (emotionality as measured by the LIWC reliably tracks the tone and mood of textual material – Kahn et al., 2007 Kahn, J. H.).

It is interesting work raising more questions while providing some useful data.

I have three top of mind candidates for why positivity might have declined in a period of rising Anglo and global well-being. Entirely speculative and more for the fun of it than with much energy invested in any of the three.

Perhaps the decline in positivity is linked to a decline in the role of Christianity in modern life and the decline in New Testament Christianity in particular (the New Testament being a much more positive perspective than the Old). Think of Matthew Arnold's lament in Dover Beach. Excerpt:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Another possible cause might be the rise in totalitarianism and ideological determinism. Marxism, fascism and their various totalitarian ideological off-spring such as postmodernism present a deterministic concept of the world where everything can be engineered towards Utopia. The energy behind Marxism and fascism tend, however, to be much more about hatred, envy, control, and anti-humanism than love and joy of a better future.

Finally, perhaps the loss of positivity might be linked to a rise in uncertainty. The period being covered falls entirely into the age of modernity driven by industrialization, scaling of the state, and an increase in complexity. The argument would be that the rise in productivity (and therefore well-being) is parallel with a rise in complexity (global trade over local, mass issues, technology development and refinement, etc.). While complexity helps deliver a better material life, it also increases uncertainty and uncertainty can drive anxiety.

All three are possible but this is mostly entertaining speculation rather than real knowledge generation. What can we do about our loss of positivity? Perhaps a little Bob Marley is needed.


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