Brazilians Use the Happiest Words

According to scientists at the University of Vermont, there is a universal tendency among people to use positive expressions rather than negative one. To measure this, scientists have applied Big Data resources to check for millions of words in hundreds of languages.

The team, led by mathematician Peter Dodds, demonstrated the so-called Pollyana Hypothesis formulated by two psychologists in the 1960s at the University of Illinois. According to the formula, people had a tendency to speak more positive things i.e. they talked more about the good things in life.

It is no wonder since the hypothesis came in 1969.

The same hypothesis has now been reinforced by the University of Vermont, with one big advantage: contrary to 1969, today the entire Internet database is available to the researchers.

The university’s computers analyzed anything from Arabic film titles, Korean twitters, Russian soap operas to Chinese internet pages, English lyrics and even world news headlines all in several languages. So the researchers came to the conclusion that in all languages (that they investigated), the use of positive words still predominates.

Also, the results showed that Brazilians are “the happiest people” according to their word usage.

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