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Historical analysis of national subjective wellbeing using millions of digitized books

An Author Correction to this article was published on 14 November 2019

This article has been updated

Abstract

In addition to improving quality of life, higher subjective wellbeing leads to fewer health problems and higher productivity, making subjective wellbeing a focal issue among researchers and governments. However, it is difficult to estimate how happy people were during previous centuries. Here we show that a method based on the quantitative analysis of natural language published over the past 200 years captures reliable patterns in historical subjective wellbeing. Using sentiment analysis on the basis of psychological valence norms, we compute a national valence index for the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Italy, indicating relative happiness in response to national and international wars and in comparison to historical trends in longevity and gross domestic product. We validate our method using Eurobarometer survey data from the 1970s and demonstrate robustness using words with stable historical meanings, diverse corpora (newspapers, magazines and books) and additional word norms. By providing a window on quantitative historical psychology, this approach could inform policy and economic history.

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Fig. 1: Correlation of the NVI and aggregate life satisfaction data from the Eurobarometer survey.
Fig. 2: NVI through the period 1820–2009.

Data availability

The data necessary to reproduce the analyses presented in this article are provided at https://github.com/warwickpsych/NationalValenceIndex.

Code availability

The code necessary to reproduce the analyses presented in this article is provided at https://github.com/warwickpsych/NationalValenceIndex.

Change history

  • 14 November 2019

    An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

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Acknowledgements

We thank colleagues for discussions on this research, especially S. Allen, S. Becker, S. Broadberry, N. Crafts, R. Duch, A. Oswald, L. Pascali, G. Ricco, D. Ronayne, J. Smith and T. Van Rens; and T. Engelthaler and L. Ying for research assistance. This work was supported by a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award WM160074 (to T.T.H.), the Alan Turing Institute (to T.T.H. and C.I.S.), and The Center for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy at the University of Warwick (to D.S. and E.P.). This research used cloud computing resources kindly provided through a Microsoft Azure for Research Award. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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T.T.H., E.P., D.S. and C.I.S. were involved in the study design, project planning, data analysis and writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Thomas T. Hills.

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Supplementary Notes, Supplementary Figs. 1–9, Supplementary Tables 1–15 and Supplementary References.

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Hills, T.T., Proto, E., Sgroi, D. et al. Historical analysis of national subjective wellbeing using millions of digitized books. Nat Hum Behav 3, 1271–1275 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0750-z

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