A massive language study, spanning Google Books, Twitter, popular songs lyrics and The New York Times, has found that English tends to look on the bright side of things. Positive words outnumber the negative.
一項囊括了Google Books、Twitter、流行歌曲歌詞和《紐約時報》的大型語言研究表明:英語傾向于著眼事物積極的一面,因為英文中正面詞匯多于負面詞匯。

Led by the University of Vermont’s Isabel Klouman, the researchers analyzed four enormous textual databases — 361 billion words in 3.29 million books on Google Books, 9 billion words in 821 million tweets issued between 2008 and 2010, 1 billion words in 1.8 million New York Times articles published from 1987 to 2007, and 58.6 million words from the lyrics of 295,000 popular songs — and compiled for each a list of the 5,000 most-used words.
這項研究由佛蒙特州的Isabel Klouman大學牽頭,學者們分析了4個大型原文數(shù)據(jù)庫——包括3百余萬冊圖書近3千億單詞的Google Books;08年到10年間twitter上發(fā)布的含有90億單詞的8億余條微博;87年到07年間《紐約時報》上發(fā)表的包括十億單詞的近2百萬篇文章以及295,000首流行歌曲中的近6千萬字的歌詞,并將在以上4個數(shù)據(jù)庫中分別統(tǒng)計出了5000個最常用的詞匯。

Altogether, positive-inflected words outnumbered the negative, and were used more frequently.“In our stories and writings we tend toward pro-social communication.”wrote Klouman and colleagues.
據(jù)統(tǒng)計,所有這些詞匯中,積極詞匯的數(shù)量超過了消極詞匯的數(shù)量,同時前者的使用頻率也大于后者。Klouman和他的同事們寫到:“在我們的文章和寫作中,更傾向于親社會行為?!保ㄐ【幾ⅲ河H社會行為又叫積極的社會行為,它是指人們表現(xiàn)出來的一些有益的行為。人們在共同的社會生活中經(jīng)常會表現(xiàn)出類似這樣的行為,比如幫助、分享、合作、安慰、捐贈、同情、關(guān)心、謙讓、互助等,心理學家把這一類行為稱為親社會行為。)