Fold Up Your Handkerchiefs: Books Have Gotten Less ‘Emotional,’ Study Says

If you find you’re crying less while reading and throwing fewer books across the room, there may be a good reason. English-language books became steadily less “emotional” over the 20th century, according to a new study crunching billions of words via Google’s Ngram database.

In the study, published in PLOS ONE, researchers at three British universities tracked the use of “mood” words sorted into six main categories: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. The researchers identified a “clear decrease” in overall use of mood words over the 20th century, with only words relating to fear increasing in the last several decades.

The draining of feeling from books could not be attributed simply to an increase in the number of technical and scientific publications, the paper said. The findings also held when the researchers looked only at fiction, where they found what they called “a real decrease in literary emotion.”

The study also found evidence of marked divergence in the relative emotional content of British and American English beginning in the 1960s. (Guess whose upper lip got even stiffer) It also identified notably “happy” and “sad” periods coinciding with historical events. World War II, for example, saw a “sad peak,” while use of happy words spiked in the 1920s and again in the 1960s, before the Anglophone world settled into another “sad” period starting in the 1970s.

The study is just the latest attempt to use huge digital databases to track broad emotional shifts across decades. In a study published last year, researchers found that the use of “individualistic” words like “independent,” “unique” and “personal” increased in American books between 1960 and 2008, while “communal” words like “team,” “collective” and “union” did not.

Some scholars, however, have questioned the methodologies of such studies. In a post at Language Log, the linguist Mark Liberman wondered if that 2012 result reflected a change in words people used to describe individualistic and communal thinking, rather than an actual change in thinking.