What Millions of Books Reveal About 200 Years of Happiness | SmartNews - Smithsonian.com

Researchers analyzed eight million texts to gauge how lifespan, warfare and the economy affect national well-being, according to Claire Bugos, print intern at Smithsonian magazine.

The team hypothesized that works published during the so-called “good old days” would be more uplifting than those penned during times of hardship
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A new study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior draws on 200 years of literature to assess the validity of an old adage: You are what you read.

Researchers from the University of Glasgow, the University of Warwick and the Alan Turing Institute surveyed more than eight million digitized texts available on Google Books to determine how well literature reflects its writers’ and readers’ subjective well-being. As Natasha Frost reports for Quartz, the team hypothesized that works published during the so-called “good old days” would be more uplifting than those penned during times of hardship.

According to the study, scientists led by Thomas T. Hills, a psychologist at Warwick, created an index of words based on their valence, or how “good” versus “bad” survey participants deemed them to be. Using this list, the team then created an algorithm that analyzed texts published in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and Italy between 1820 and 2009...
 
The new algorithm simply counts the frequency of certain words. Humans, on the other hand, understand language in a broader context and often derive meaning beyond the literal definition of words on a page. Aware of these limitations, the authors tried to study words that retained a stable meaning over time or use measures that accounted for changing definitions over time. The word “gay,” for instance, does not necessarily mean the same thing now as it did 200 years ago.
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Source: Smithsonian.com