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Does QWERTY affect happiness?

Last week, news broke of a paper published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review by Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto claiming to observe a positive relationship between the “right-handedness” of a word and its emotional valence. This is being called the ‘QWERTY effect’. (You may recall that ‘valence’ is psych-speak for ‘happiness’ associated with words.  What I called …

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Positivity of the English language

By analyzing a rather large collection of words (a good fraction of a trillion) we extracted from the New York Times, music lyrics, the Google Books project, and Twitter, we've found that English is inherently positive. The manuscript is here, and some early press from Wired is here. Abstract: Within the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a …

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