title: The expression of emotions in 20th century books.
abstract: We report here trends in the usage of "mood" words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-related words through time. Finally, we show that, in books, American English has become decidedly more "emotional" than British English in the last half-century, as a part of a more general increase of the stylistic divergence between the two variants of English language.
authors.affiliation: Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom. alberto.acerbi@gmail.com
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Acerbi
authors.forename: Vasileios
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Lampos
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Garnett
authors.forename: R Alexander
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Bentley
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D001877:Books / Q000266:history; D004644:Emotions; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language / Q000266:history