Positive words carry less information than negative words

David Garcia, Antonios Garas, Frank Schweitzer

(Submitted on 18 Oct 2011 (v1), last revised 22 Nov 2011 (this version, v2))

http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.4123

We show that the frequency of word use 

is not only determined by the word length [1] 

and the average information content [2], 

but also by its emotional content.

We have analysed three established 

lexica of affective word usage 

in English, German, and Spanish, 

to verify that these lexica 

have a neutral, unbiased, emotional content. 

Taking into account the frequency of word usage, 

we find that words with a positive emotional content 

are more frequently used. 

This lends support to Pollyanna hypothesis [3] 

that there should be a positive bias in human expression. 

We also find that negative words 

contain more information than positive words, 

as the informativeness of a word 

increases uniformly with its valence decrease. 

Our findings support earlier conjectures about 

(i) the relation between word frequency and information content, 

and (ii) the impact of positive emotions on communication and social links.

Comments:

13 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables

Subjects:

Computation and Language (cs.CL); 

Information Retrieval (cs.IR); 

Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)

Cite as:

arXiv:1110.4123v2 [cs.CL]

Submission history

From: Antonios Garas [view email] 

[v1] Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:54:21 GMT (279kb,D)

[v2] Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:19:34 GMT (1165kb,D)