Birth of the cool: a two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction

The presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality (such as demographic dynamics concerning age or gender balance, changes in vocabulary richness, or changes in the prevalence of literary genres), and that, in our three corpora, the decrease is driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little if any decline. Consistently with previous studies, we also find a link between ageing and negative emotionality at the individual level.研究证实，故事中融入情感词汇与情感内容，可有效提升其记忆留存度与文化传播成效。然而，近年的文化趋势却呈现相反走向。本研究依托谷歌图书语料库（Google Books Corpus）与两组富含元数据（metadata）的英语小说语料库，证实19世纪起英语文学作品的情感性（emotionality）已呈现持续下滑趋势。本研究进一步表明，该下滑趋势无法由与情感表达无关的变量变化所解释——包括年龄与性别结构的人口统计学动态、词汇丰富度变迁，或是文学体裁流行度的演变；且在本次研究的三组语料库中，情感性的下降几乎完全源于正向情感相关词汇占比的缩减，而负向情感相关词汇的出现频率几乎未出现任何下滑。与此前研究结论一致，本研究同样发现个体层面的衰老与负向情感表达存在显著关联。