Positive words: The glue to social interaction

Words charged with a positive emotional content are used more frequently, thus enhancing human communication.

Scientists at ETH Zurich have studied the use of language, finding that words with a positive emotional content are more frequently used in written communication. This result supports the theory that social relations are enhanced by a positive bias in human communication. The study by David Garcia and his colleagues from the Chair of Systems Design is published in the first issue of the new SpringerOpen journal EPJ Data Science.

Previous studies focused on word lengths and frequency. They demonstrated that frequency depends on the length of words used, as a result of the principle of least effort influencing the use of shorter words. In contrast, this study focused on how the emotions expressed in words relate to the word frequency and its information content. The authors focused on words used in written emotional expression in the three most popular European languages online: English, German and Spanish.

They exploited a dataset on human behavior on the Internet, which includes texts from blogs, chat rooms and forums, among other sources. After performing a quantitative analysis on this dataset, the authors found that positive words appeared more frequently than words associated with a negative emotion. This suggests that the emotional content affects the words' frequency, even though the overall emotional content of the studied words is neutral on average. These findings support existing theories that there is a positive bias in human expression to facilitate social interaction.

Going one step further, the authors also focused on words within their context and realized that positive words carried less information than negative ones. Therefore, because of the positive bias observed in human communication, positive words are more likely to be used whereas negative expressions could be reserved to transmit information about urgent threats and dangerous events.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Springer Science+Business Media, via AlphaGalileo.

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Journal Reference:

David Garcia, Antonios Garas, Frank Schweitzer. Positive words carry less information than negative words. EPJ Data Science, 2012; 1 (1) DOI: 10.1140/epjds3

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Alcohol abuse may be cause, rather than effect of social isolation, poor grades among teens

Rather than gaining "liquid courage" to let loose with friends, teenage drinkers are more likely to feel like social outcasts, according to a new sociological study.

Published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, the study shows alcohol consumption leads to increased social stress and poor grades, especially among students in schools with tightly-connected friendship cliques and low levels of alcohol abuse.

For their study, Robert Crosnoe, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, Aprile Benner, an assistant professor of human ecology at the University of Texas at Austin, and Barbara Schneider, a professor of sociology and education at Michigan State University, analyzed National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) data on 8,271 adolescents from 126 schools. Add Health, which began in 1994, is the largest and most comprehensive survey of health-related behavior among adolescents between grades 7 and 12.

The researchers, who also drew on Add Health's companion Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement transcript study, found a correlation between drinking and feelings of loneliness and not fitting in across all school environments. But these feelings were especially significant among self-reported drinkers in schools where fellow students tended to avoid alcohol and were tightly connected to each other. When not surrounded by fellow drinkers, they are more likely to feel like social outcasts, said Crosnoe, who, along with Benner, is a research affiliate at the University of Texas at Austin's Population Research Center.

"This finding doesn't imply that drinkers would be better off in schools in which peer networks are tightly organized around drinking," Crosnoe said. "Instead, the results suggest that we need to pay attention to youth in problematic school environments in general but also to those who may have trouble in seemingly positive school environments."

The researchers, who adjusted statistically for factors such as ethnicity, race, gender, and socioeconomic circumstances, tracked the respondents' grade point averages and found a direct link between feelings of isolation and declining grades. The difference between drinkers who felt as though they did not fit in socially in school and their peers could equal as much as three tenths of a point in grade point average from year to year.

"In general, adolescents who feel as though they don't fit in at school often struggle academically, even when capable and even when peers value academic success, because they become more focused on their social circumstances than their social and academic activities," Crosnoe said.

The study, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, has resulted in recommendations for how public schools should address nonacademic dimensions of school life and youth development in attempts to meet academic accountability benchmarks.

"Given that social development is a crucial component of schooling, it's important to connect these social and emotional experiences of drinking to how teenagers are doing academically," Crosnoe said.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Sociological Association, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Journal Reference:

R. Crosnoe, A. D. Benner, B. Schneider. Drinking, Socioemotional Functioning, and Academic Progress in Secondary School. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 2012; 53 (2): 150 DOI: 10.1177/0022146511433507

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.