A study of more than five million books, both fiction and non-fiction, has found a marked decline in the use of emotional words over time. The researchers from the University of Bristol used Google Ngram Viewer, a facility for finding the frequency of terms in scanned books, to search for more than 600 particular words identified as representing anger, dislike, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.
一项对500多万本书籍（小说和非小说）的研究发现，随着时间的推移，情感词汇的使用量显著下降。布里斯托大学的研究人员使用谷歌Ngram Viewer（一种扫描书籍发现词频的工具）搜索600多个表示愤怒、厌恶、恐惧、喜悦、悲伤和惊讶的特定单词。
They found that almost all of the categories showed a drop in these “mood words” over time. Only in the category of fear was there an increase in usage.
他们发现，随着时间的推移，几乎所有类别的“情感词汇”都有所下降。只有在恐惧这一类别中，使用量才有所增加。
“It is a steady and continuous decrease,” said Dr Alberto Acerbi. He assumed that the result might be explained by a change in the position occupied by literature, in a crowded media landscape. “One thing could be that in parallel to books the 20th century saw the start of other media. Maybe these media—movies, radio, drama—had more emotional content than books.”
阿尔伯托·阿克比博士说：“这是一个稳定而持续的下降”。他认为，在拥挤的媒体环境中，文学所占据的地位发生的变化可能可以解释这一结果。“有一点可能是，20世纪出现了其他媒体。也许这些媒体——电影、广播、戏剧——比书籍更具情感含量。”
Although both joy and sadness followed the general downwards trend, the research, published in the journal PLOS One, found that they also exhibited another interesting behavior: the ratio between the two varied greatly, apparently mirroring historical events.
尽管喜悦和悲伤都遵循着总体下降的趋势，但发表在《PLOS One》杂志上的这项研究发现，它们还表现出另一种有趣的行为：两者之间的比率差异很大，显然反映了历史事件。
During the Roaring Twenties the joy-to-sadness ratio reached a peak that would not occur again until before the recent financial crash. But the ratio plunged at the height of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the researchers held a reserved opinion about their claim that their result reflected wider social trends. In the paper, they even argue that the reverse could be true.
在咆哮的二十年代，喜悦与悲伤的比率达到了一个峰值，直到最近的金融危机之前才会再次出现。但这一比率在第二次世界大战最激烈时急剧下降。然而，研究人员对他们的研究结果反映了更广泛的社会趋势的说法持保留意见。在论文中，他们甚至认为可能相反。
“It has been suggested, for example, that it was the suppression of desire in ordinary Elizabethan English life that increased demand for writing ‘filled with romance and sex’ … perhaps,” they conclude, “songs and books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body.”
“例如，有人认为，正是伊丽莎白时代普通英国生活中对欲望的压制，才增加了对‘充满浪漫和性’的写作的需求……也许，”他们总结道，“歌曲和书籍可能无法反映真实的人群，就像走秀模特不能反映普通人的身体一样。”
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