Human language reveals a universal positivity bias
  Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias; (2) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation; and (3) this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word usage. Alongside these general regularities, we describe inter-language variations in the emotional spectrum of languages which allow us to rank corpora. We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement of the emotional content of large-scale texts. 
Peter Sheridan Dodds, Eric M. Clark, Suma Desu, Morgan R. Frank,   Andrew J. Reagan, Jake Ryland Williams, Lewis Mitchell, K...
physics.soc-ph cs.CL cs.SI