词汇大师-- The Declining Happiness in Song Lyrics

　　AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: a happiness meter built on word choice. We continue our conversation with Chris Danforth, a mathematician¹ at the University of Vermont. He and his colleague Peter Dodds did a computer analysis of the feelings expressed in almost ten million sentences written by two million English speaking bloggers.
Each sentence received a happiness score based on their use of a thousand or so words. These came from an unrelated psychology² study in which college students rated the words on a scale of one to nine. Words like paradise and love rate high; words like hostage and trauma³ rate low.
Chris Danforth says demographic data like the blogger's age was also factored in. And guess what?

　　CHRIS DANFORTH: "Happiness really does change as you move through your life as a function of age. These sociologists have always wanted to say that there's this sort of mountain-shaped curve as a function of age, and that's exactly what we saw for these two million people. And that's one of the first times that it's been seen."
RS: "How do you think your study addresses the American character and our happiness?"
CHRIS DANFORTH: "There's a couple of other things that we found that are I think a little bit more related to the American experience. So one thing is that we found that happiness follows roughly the same curve as a function of distance from the Earth's equator. So it sort of rolls over and peaks somewhere near the center of the United States, in that latitude⁴ around thirty-five, forty degrees la titude.
"And the work week turns out to be a part of this story too. So the weekends tend to be fairly happy and Wednesday turned out to be the saddest day. So people's daily experience is being reflected somewhat in what they're saying. And this is more of a story, we think, for Twitter messages, which we've just started to pay attention to, about a year ago."
AA: "These hundred-forty character messages, little tweets."
CHRIS DANFORTH: "Right. They're a little bit more fresh. They're more about what you're doing right now, and less about something you've been thinking about for a long time or something you're complaining about or something you did yesterday, which is what bloggers tend to be writing about."
RS: "So where do you go from here?"
CHRIS DANFORTH: "So that's really the next step for us, is using these Twitter messages. In terms of the bigger picture, we're thinking that this down the road could turn into something like a gross national happiness index like the country of Bhutan has.
"And it would be nice if we had a way to measure in real time how people are doing around the world, in a way that was non-reactive, that they didn't know we were doing it, we were doing our best to observe them in a natural environment and not deal with the problems of self-report that show up in some of the other studies."
RS: "The title of your paper is 'Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents.' We've talked a little bit about blogs, but how do the songs and presidents fit in?"
CHRIS DANFORTH: "We decided⁵ initially⁶ that we would look at songs to see if what we were doing made any sense. So I downloaded all the song lyrics⁷ available on the Internet over the last sixty years' or so worth of music. And I wrote a program to go to the iTunes database and query⁸ the genre⁹ and release year for each one of these songs.
"And we ended up finding that happiness really has been declining in music lyrics fairly significantly over the last forty-five, fifty years. Broken down by genre, we saw that the music really hasn't changed very much. Gospel and soul is very happy, and pop music and country music, folk music -- those are all flat as a function of time.
"And then in the eighties you start to see hip-hop and rap and punk and metal and industrial. And the appearance of those genres¹⁰ is really responsible for pulling down the happiness as a function of time for all of the music lyrics.
"We also downloaded all the State of the Union addresses for all the presidents, and we found that John F. Kennedy, not surprisingly, was the one whose rhetoric¹¹ ended up being the highest, and Eisenhower and Reagan scored fairly high. And we found that as a function of time, the happiness scores for these State of the Union addresses tended to match world events fairly accurately¹²."
RS: "Now, out of all these words, do you have a favorite happy word that makes you feel good when you come to work each day?"
CHRIS DANFORTH: "[Laughs] Well, a thousand thirty-four is a lot of words, right? And occasionally we'll look through the list and wonder why somebody decided that that word should make it. And I think one of my favorites is pancakes. So pancakes gets a six out of nine on the happiness scale, and I know that when I'm making pancakes for my daughter, I'm usually pretty happy."
AA: You can find the first part of our interview with Chris Danforth from the University of Vermont at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. The research paper is in the Journal of Happiness Studies. And that's WORDMASTER for this week. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 mathematician   

n.数学家

参考例句：

• The man with his back to the camera is a mathematician.背对着照相机的人是位数学家。
• The mathematician analyzed his figures again.这位数学家再次分析研究了他的这些数字。

2 psychology   

n.心理，心理学，心理状态

参考例句：

• She has a background in child psychology.她受过儿童心理学的教育。
• He studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge.他在剑桥大学学习哲学和心理学。

3 trauma   

n.外伤，精神创伤

参考例句：

• Counselling is helping him work through this trauma.心理辅导正帮助他面对痛苦。
• The phobia may have its root in a childhood trauma.恐惧症可能源于童年时期的创伤。

4 latitude   

n.纬度，行动或言论的自由(范围)，(pl.)地区

参考例句：

• The latitude of the island is 20 degrees south.该岛的纬度是南纬20度。
• The two cities are at approximately the same latitude.这两个城市差不多位于同一纬度上。

5 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

6 initially   

adv.最初，开始

参考例句：

• The ban was initially opposed by the US.这一禁令首先遭到美国的反对。
• Feathers initially developed from insect scales.羽毛最初由昆虫的翅瓣演化而来。

7 lyrics   

n.歌词

参考例句：

• music and lyrics by Rodgers and Hart 由罗杰斯和哈特作词作曲
• The book contains lyrics and guitar tablatures for over 100 songs. 这本书有100多首歌的歌词和吉他奏法谱。

8 query   

n.疑问，问号，质问；vt.询问，表示怀疑

参考例句：

• I query very much whether it is wise to act so hastily.我真怀疑如此操之过急地行动是否明智。
• They raised a query on his sincerity.他们对他是否真诚提出质疑。

9 genre   

n.(文学、艺术等的)类型，体裁，风格

参考例句：

• My favorite music genre is blues.我最喜欢的音乐种类是布鲁斯音乐。
• Superficially,this Shakespeare's work seems to fit into the same genre.从表面上看， 莎士比亚的这个剧本似乎属于同一类型。

10 genres   

（文学、艺术等的）类型，体裁，风格( genre的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Novel and short story are different genres. 长篇小说和短篇小说是不同的类别。
• But confusions over the two genres have a long history. 但是类型的混淆，古已有之。 来自汉英文学 - 散文英译

11 rhetoric   

n.修辞学，浮夸之言语

参考例句：

• Do you know something about rhetoric?你懂点修辞学吗？
• Behind all the rhetoric,his relations with the army are dangerously poised.在冠冕堂皇的言辞背后，他和军队的关系岌岌可危。

12 accurately   

adv.准确地，精确地

参考例句：

• It is hard to hit the ball accurately.准确地击中球很难。
• Now scientists can forecast the weather accurately.现在科学家们能准确地预报天气。