Variations in average word valence of Russian books over a century and social change

V. V. Bochkarev ; V. D. Solovyev ; T. A. Nestik ; A. V. Shevlyakova

Zapiski Nauchnykh Seminarov POMI, Investigations on applied mathematics and informatics. Part II–1, Tome 529 (2023), pp. 24-42

Résumé

Valence of words in books reflects the situation in a society and allows one to assess the perception of life even in those countries and periods of time when direct research on well-being has not been conducted. We use the Google Books Ngram diachronic text corpus to analyze changes in the average valence of words in Russian books. We show that changes in the average valence correlate with the results of surveys on well-being. The average valence also responds to major historical events and social changes. Like other similar studies, quantitative data on the level of valence of words are based on calculations using dictionaries with word valence ratings. For the first time, we have carried out a comparative study based on a number of the most relevant Russian dictionaries. We have found that the obtained results depend on the applied meaning of such dictionaries and their lexical composition. This shows the need for careful selection of dictionaries for future research.

Bibliographie

[1] Hedonometer word list: labmt-ru-v2, (last accessed 2023/03/15) https://hedonometer.org/words/labMT-ru-v2/

[2] The technology of creation of semantic electronic dictionaries, (last accessed 2023/03/15) https://kpfu.ru/tehnologiya-sozdaniya-semanticheskih-elektronnyh.html

[3] World economic outlook, (last accessed 2023/03/15) https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO

[4] A. D. Aseev and V. V. Shishkov, “Sovetskii soiuz v lovushke “imperskogo perenapriazheniia”: voprosy i problemy analiza sovetskoi politiki”, Vestnik Moskovskogo Gosudarstvennogo Lingvisticheskogo Universiteta. Obshchestvennye nauki, 2022, no. 3, 9–17

[5] A. Bandura, C. Pastorelli, C. Barbaranelli, G. Caprara, “Self-efficacy pathways to child depression”, J. Personality and Social Psychology, 76 (1999), 258–69

[6] H.-W.-S. Bao, H. Cai, Z. Huang, “Discerning cultural shifts in china? commentary on hamamura et al. (2021)”, American Psychologist, 77:6 (2022), 786–788

[7] M. Bauer, C. Blattman, J. Chytilova, J. Henrich, E. Miguel, T. Mitts, Can war foster cooperation?, J. Economic Perspectives, 30:3 (2016), 249–74

[8] V. V. Bocharov, S. V. Alexeeva, D. V. Granovsky, E. V. Protopopova, M. E. Stepanova, A. V. Surikov, “Crowdsourcing morphological annotation”, Papers from the Annual International Conference “Dialogue”, Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies, 12, RGGU, 2013, 109–115

[9] J. Bollen, M. ten Thij, F. Breithaupt, A. Barron, L. Rutter, L. Lorenzo-Luaces, M. Scheffer, “Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (2021), e2102061118

[10] J. Boucher, C. E. Osgood, “The pollyanna hypothesis”, J. Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8:1 (1969), 1–8

[11] M. M. Bradley, P. J. Lang, Affective norms for english words (anew): Instruction manual and affective ratings, 1999

[12] C. O. Brand, A. Acerbi, A. Mesoudi, “Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics”, Evolutionary Human Sciences, 1 (2019), e11

[13] P. Dodds, E. Clark, S. Desu, M. Frank, A. Reagan, J. Williams, L. Mitchell, K. Harris, I. Kloumann, J. Bagrow, K. Megerdoomian, M. Mcmahon, B. Tivnan, Ch. Danforth, “Human language reveals a universal positivity bias”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112 (2014)

[14] P. M. Greenfield, “The changing psychology of culture from 1800 through 2000”, Psychological Science, 24:9 (2013), 1722–1731

[15] T. T. Hills, E. Proto, D. Sgroi, C. I. Seresinhe, “Historical analysis of national subjective wellbeing using millions of digitized books”, Nature Human Behaviour, 3:12 (2019), 1271–1275

[16] R. Iliev, J. Hoover, M. Dehghani, R. Axelrod, “Linguistic positivity in historical texts reflects dynamic environmental and psychological factors”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113:49 (2016), E7871–E7879

[17] E. A. Kamalov, E. D. Ponarin, “National pride and subjective well-being of russians”, Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes, 2020, no. 1, 177–205

[18] I. M. Kloumann, C. M. Danforth, K. D. Harris, C. A. Bliss, P. S. Dodds, “Positivity of the english language”, PLOS ONE, 7:1 (2012), 1–7

[19] O. Y. Koltsova, S. V. Alexeeva, S. N. Kolcov, “An opinion word lexicon and a training dataset for russian sentiment analysis of social media”, Komp'yuternaia Lingvistika i Intellektual'nye Tekhnologii, Trudy Mezhdunarodnoj Konferentsii “Dialog”, 2016, 277–287

[20] E. V. Kotel'nikov, E. V. Razova, A. V. Kotel'nikova, S. V. Vychegzhanin, “Sovremennye slovari ocenochnoj leksiki dlya analiza mnenij na russkom i anglijskom yazykah (analitich-eskij obzor)”, Nauchno-tekhnicheskaya informaciya. Seriya 2: Informacionnye processy i sistemy, 2020, no. 12, 16–33

[21] D. I. Kulagin, “Publicly available sentiment dictionary for the russian language kartaslovsent”, Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies, 20, 2021, 1106–1119

[22] M. Lamont, “From 'having' to 'being': self-worth and the current crisis of american society”, The British Journal of Sociology, 70 (2019), 660–707

[23] C. S. Leonard, “The Soviet Economy (1918–1991)”, The Contemporary Russian Economy, Springer Books, ed. Marek Dabrowski, Springer, 2023, 61–77

[24] Y. Lin, J.-B. Michel, E. A. Lieberman, J. Orwant, W. Brockman, S. Petrov, “Syntactic annotations for the Google Books NGram corpus”, Proceedings of the ACL 2012 System Demonstrations (Jeju Island, Korea, July 2012), Association for Computational Linguistics, 169–174

[25] N. Loukachevitch, A. Levchik, “Creating a general Russian sentiment lexicon”, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC'16 (Portorož, Slovenia, May 2016), European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 1171–1176

[26] A. Markevich, M. Harrison, “Great war, civil war, and recovery: Russia's national income, 1913 to 1928”, J. Economic History, 71:3 (2011), 672–703

[27] S. Mohammad, “Obtaining reliable human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for 20,000 English words”, Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Melbourne, Australia), v. 1, Long Papers, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018, 174–184

[28] O. Morin, A. Acerbi, “Birth of the cool: a two-centuries decline in emotional expression in anglophone fiction”, Cognition and Emotion, 31:8 (2017), 1663–1675

[29] K. Napier, L. Shamir, “Quantitative sentiment analysis of lyrics in popular music”, J. Popular Music Studies, 30 (2018), 161–176

[30] T. A. Nestik, A. L. Zhuravlev, Psikhologiia global'nykh riskov, IP RAS, M., 2018

[31] T. Nguyen, D. Phung, B. Adams, T. Tran, S. Venkatesh, “Classification and pattern discovery of mood in weblogs”, Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, eds. Mohammed J. Zaki, Jeffrey Xu Yu, B. Ravindran, and Vikram Pudi, Springer, Berlin–Heidelberg, 2010, 283–290

[32] S. Oishi, J. Graham, S. Kesebir, I. C. Galinha, “Concepts of happiness across time and cultures”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39:5 (2013), 559–577

[33] J. Oyanedel, D. Paez, “Editorial: Social belongingness and well-being: International perspectives”, Frontiers in Psychology, 12 (2021)

[34] L. Peng, S. Luo, “Impact of social economic development on positive and negative affect among chinese college students: a cross-temporal meta-analysis, 2001–2016”, Culture and Brain, 10:2 (2022), 95–112

[35] J. W. Pennebaker, C. K. Chung, M. Ireland, A. Gonzales, R. J. Booth, The development and psychometric properties of liwc2007, Austin, TX, LIWC. Net, 2007 (English)

[36] T. Piketty, Capital and ideology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2020

[37] L. Qiu, J. Lu, C. Chiu, “Detecting the needs for happiness and meaning in life from google books”, 2014 International Conference on Orange Technologies, 2014, 145–148

[38] D. G. Rand, G. Kraft-Todd, J. Gruber, “The collective benefits of feeling good and letting go: Positive emotion and (dis)inhibition interact to predict cooperative behavior”, PLOS ONE, 10:1 (2015), 1–12

[39] V. A. Sibirev, N. A. Golovin, “Intergenerational differences in life satisfaction and a feel-ing of happiness in russia (based on the european social survey data)”, Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes, 2020, no. 1, 296–315

[40] S. Smirnov, “Industrial output in the ussr and russia, 1861–2012. part i. reconstruction of basic time-series”, Voprosy Ekonomiki, 2013, no. 6, 59–83

[41] V. Solovyev, V. Bochkarev, V. Bayrasheva, “Dynamics of emotions in european lan-guages”, The 7th international conference on cognitive science (Moscow, Institute of Psychology of RAS, 2016), 71–72

[42] V. Solovyev, M. Islamov, V. Bayrasheva, “Dictionary with the evaluation of positivity/negativity degree of the russian words”, Speech and Computer, 24th International Conference, SPECOM 2022 (Gurugram, India, November 14–16, 2022), Springer-Verlag, Berlin–Heidelberg, 2022, 651–664

[43] V. D. Solovyev, V. V. Bochkarev, A. D. Kaveeva, “Variations of social psychology of russian society in last 100 years”, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Smart City/SocialCom/SustainCom/DataCom/SC2 2015 (Chengdu, China, December 19-21, 2015), IEEE Computer Society, 2015, 519–523

[44] J. M. Twenge, W. K. Campbell, B. Gentile, “Male and female pronoun use in u.s. books reflects women's status, 1900–2008”, Sex Roles, 67:9-10 (2012), 488–493

[45] B. B. Velichkovsky, V. D. Solovyev, V. V. Bochkarev, F. F. Ishkineeva, “Transition to market economy promotes individualistic values: Analysing changes in frequencies of russian words from 1980 to 2008”, International Journal of Psychology, 54:1 (2019), 23–32

[46] P. F. Wodarz, I. G. Harris, “Historical and contemporary patterns of emotional expression in written texts”, Research Square, 2022