emotions | Alberto Acerbi

emotions

Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics

Popular music offers a rich source of data that provides insights into long-term cultural evolutionary dynamics. One major trend in popular music, as well as other cultural products such as literary fiction, is an increase over time in negatively …

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

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 …

Books average previous decade of economic misery

For the 20th century since the Depression, we find a strong correlation between a ‘literary misery index’ derived from English language books and a moving average of the previous decade of the annual U.S. economic misery index, which is the sum of …

Robustness of emotion extraction from 20th century English books

In this paper, we test the robustness of emotion extraction from English language books published in the 20th century. Our analysis is performed on a sample of the 8 million digitized books available in the Google Books Ngram corpus by applying three …

The expression of emotions in 20th century books

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 …