A massive language study, spanning Google Books, Twitter, popular songs lyrics and The New York Times, has found that English tends to look on the bright side of things. Positive words outnumber the negative.
一项囊括了Google Books、Twitter、流行歌曲歌词和《纽约时报》的大型语言研究表明:英语倾向于着眼事物积极的一面,因为英文中正面词汇多于负面词汇。

Led by the University of Vermont’s Isabel Klouman, the researchers analyzed four enormous textual databases — 361 billion words in 3.29 million books on Google Books, 9 billion words in 821 million tweets issued between 2008 and 2010, 1 billion words in 1.8 million New York Times articles published from 1987 to 2007, and 58.6 million words from the lyrics of 295,000 popular songs — and compiled for each a list of the 5,000 most-used words.
这项研究由佛蒙特州的Isabel Klouman大学牵头,学者们分析了4个大型原文数据库——包括3百余万册图书近3千亿单词的Google Books;08年到10年间twitter上发布的含有90亿单词的8亿余条微博;87年到07年间《纽约时报》上发表的包括十亿单词的近2百万篇文章以及295,000首流行歌曲中的近6千万字的歌词,并将在以上4个数据库中分别统计出了5000个最常用的词汇。

Altogether, positive-inflected words outnumbered the negative, and were used more frequently.“In our stories and writings we tend toward pro-social communication.”wrote Klouman and colleagues.
据统计,所有这些词汇中,积极词汇的数量超过了消极词汇的数量,同时前者的使用频率也大于后者。Klouman和他的同事们写到:“在我们的文章和写作中,更倾向于亲社会行为。”(小编注:亲社会行为又叫积极的社会行为,它是指人们表现出来的一些有益的行为。人们在共同的社会生活中经常会表现出类似这样的行为,比如帮助、分享、合作、安慰、捐赠、同情、关心、谦让、互助等,心理学家把这一类行为称为亲社会行为。)