Monday 21 June 2010

Language reflects the balance of good & bad

For every bad you show me, I’ll show you something good… Better yet! For every 1 x bad thing, I’ll show you at least 5 x good!

’Positive events outnumber negative events’. (source)

And here are the results of recent study to support it:
After analysing a corpus of 100 million words of spoken and written English, Paul & Rozin say that language reflects the balance of good and bad. They found that positive words are used far more often than negative words - just as you'd expect if positive events are more common. To take one example, 'good' is mentioned 795 times per million words compared with 153 mentions per million for 'bad'’ (source).

Which would look something like this:
 image
Satisfyingly reassuring, quietly comforting, and 
truly encouraging. Great stuff!
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