Research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proved that every human language is biased toward the positive, but that the degree to which this bias occurs can vary widely between different languages.
People's tendency to remember the good more than the bad and recall things in positive terms (even when the reality doesn't mesh) is known as the Pollyanna principle, named after the eponymous character of Eleanor H. Porter's 1913 novel Pollyanna, about a girl who plays the "glad game"—trying to find something to be glad about in every situation.
To map out this bias, linguists used a huge corpus of digitized text from sources such as Twitter, Google Books and online news media to determine the 100,000 most frequently used words in ten global languages, including English, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. A group of 50 native speakers was then asked to score the emotional resonance of each of these words.
If there were no such thing as positivity bias, the median emotional values for these words would fall smack bang in the middle of the emotional scale. Every corpus from every language tested, however, invariably saw the median emotional resonance of words fall into positive territory.
Of all the languages researchers tested, Spanish proved to have the most pronounced positivity bias while Chinese had the most negligible. While it might be unfair to call sinophones completely neg, they're certainly the least likely to say that the glass is half-full.
INFOGRAPHIC: The second languages of the world, and what it says about China
These finding go some way to explaining why Chinese literature is so depressing and why every chart-topper seems to be about jilted, but it also opens up a whole new array of questions. For example, could switching from speaking Chinese to speaking Spanish actually make you happier? Could changing the country's official language to Español lift spirits overnight?
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