AUTHOR=Jacobs Arthur M. , Herrmann Berenike , Lauer Gerhard , Lüdtke Jana , Schroeder Sascha 

TITLE=Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect?

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=11

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.574746

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.574746

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B3">Boucher and Osgood’s (1969)</xref> famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B5">Dodds et al., 2015</xref>), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect. Here we tested this prediction applying an unsupervised vector space model-based sentiment analysis tool called <italic>SentiArt</italic> (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B20">Jacobs, 2019</xref>) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (500 books). Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, both corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature.</p>