An American study that analyzed how billions of words are used in literature and on Twitter discovered that human language tends to use "happier" words over sad ones.

In 1969, two psychologists at the University of Illinois came up with the Pollyanna Hypothesis, which suggests humans tend to favor positive words and to look towards the "bright side of life". A modern team of researchers decided to take a large scale approach to proving this theory.

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Researchers from the University of Vermont and The MITRE Corporation collected and analyzed billions of words and their frequency in a variety of texts, including literature, social media, newspapers, even lyrics and movie subtitles.

They identified about 10,000 of the most frequently used words in English, French, Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (simplified), Korean, Russian, Arabic, and Indonesian.

"We looked at 10 languages. And in every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones," said UVM mathematician Peter Dodds.

In measuring how those words were "received" by individuals, native speakers of the 10 languages rated how they felt in response to the words on a scale, with 1 corresponding to most negative or saddest, and 9 being most positive or happiest. A Google web crawl revealed Spanish had the highest average rate of happy words while Chinese had the lowest.

Regardless of the language the words were found to be skewed above the neutral score of five on their one-to-nine scale. This showed what the researchers called a "usage-invariant positivity bias" meaning we "use more happy words than sad words," said UVM mathematician Chris Danforth who co-led the new research.

As part of the study, the scientists used a "hedonometer," or happiness meter analyzes data on social media or in literature to provide visualizations of the emotional content of such works.

The findings of the new study can be found in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tagsoptimism, positive words, human language, Language, Spanish, happy words