happy+or+sad?

If you read over my ... and how does that make you feel? (<-- you can click on that!) page, you will have read about how I asked people to list five emotions and how I wanted to do the following: New Experiment 1: I would like to take a class full of people (at least 20) and give them a poll, asking what emotion they are most closely feeling between happy, sad, or neutral, followed by the same prompt that I gave above, to see how the mood they are in affects the words they create.

Well, I did that and the results turned out pretty much how I assumed they would, but we'll get to that later. For now, let me explain the differences between what happened on the website and what happened in class.

When I asked people on this site to give me words, I asked for emotions. However, I asked for the class to give me five words that they associated with emotions. Some of the words I got were actual emotions (happy, sad, excited, etc.), but I also got some words that were associated with emotion (smile, relationships, etc.). I also asked the students to confirm whether they were feeling happy, sad, or kind of neutral before they wrote any words down. That was a very important factor in this experiment because I was curious to see whether people can typically only come up with negative words (as inferred by the site project) or if they all gave negatively skewed words because of a bad mood that they were in. Another benefit of this classroom project was that each student had to, without talking to anyone else, write everything down on paper. On the site, anyone would be able to read what had been written above them and those words could influence what words were written by the "new" subject.

Conclusion: So, after going through this experiment two different ways, you may be asking what the outcome was? Well, for the online survey, you should see the page that is linked at the top of this webpage. However, for this classroom experiment, it is easy to see that negative emotions heavily outweigh the positive by 20%! As far as emotions go, negative seems to be the way to go. Allow me to explain: you see, by using dictionaries and libraries and many other sources, one psychologist analyzed 558 emotion words, and from that study, he determined that 62% of those words were negative, while only 38% of the words were positive. This fact leads me to conclude that perhaps we are not always depressed, nor are we fed only negative words by negative people, but that the english language itself is off balance in it's negative to positive ratio. This fact alone should motivate people to try to make a change and become more positive, dispite the "status quo" that has come to be our lives. There are some positives, however, to this experiment. If you take a look down the page a bit to the tables based upon the words that were associated with emotions, a much more positive skew is seen instead of a negative. However, the "neutral" words were the ones that really took over that study. In all but one of the tables, negative words were actually the least common, and in that one table where it was not, it took up half of the tallies, merely because there were only two words written down at all. Because of the english language and how it was constructed, these numbers actually make sense. While yes, I thought that a persons mood heavily affected their ability to write down positive or negative words, I found that this was not, in fact, true - not to the degree I thought it would be, at least. If you take a look at the numbers, you'll realize that the people who said they were happy did write down more positive words than negative words, but if you take a closer look at the numbers, you'll notice that there really isn't much of a gap between those numbers. In fact, there is only a 2 word (6.5%) difference in those numbers. Yet if you take notice to the numbers that fall into the "sad" category, you'll see that the negatives highly outweigh the positives. So what am I getting at here? Basically that our emotions can be controlled by us, but how we describe them is limited by the english language, however negative it may be.

__**TABLES! YAY!**__
Let's start with the actual emotions that were written down, shall we? __**For every student polled:**__
 * =  ||= positive ||= negative ||= neutral ||= total words ||
 * = number of times written ||= 27 ||= 40 ||= 1 ||= 68 ||
 * = percentage ||= 39% ||= 59% ||= 2% ||= 100% ||

__**For students who claimed they were "happy":**__
 * =  ||= positive ||= negative ||= neutral ||= total words ||
 * = number of times written ||= 16 ||= 14 ||= 1 ||= 31 ||
 * = percentage ||= 52% ||= 45% ||= 3% ||= 100% ||

__**For students who claimed they were feeling "neutral":**__
 * =  ||= positive ||= negative ||= neutral ||= total words ||
 * = number of times written ||= 10 ||= 19 ||= -- ||= 29 ||
 * = percentage ||= 35% ||= 65% ||= -- ||= 100% ||

__**For students who claimed they were "sad":**__
 * =  ||= positive ||= negative ||= neutral ||= total words ||
 * = number of times written ||= 1 ||= 7 ||= -- ||= 8 ||
 * = percentage ||= 13% ||= 87% ||= -- ||= 100% ||

Words listed for emotions and how many times are as follows: Happy – 10 Sad – 9 Angry – 5 Ecstatic – 4 Mad – 4 Depressed – 3 Excited – 3 Joy – 3 Pain – 3 Upset – 3 Love – 2 Positive – 2 Stressed – 2 Cheerful Confused Disappointed Distraught Distressed Emptiness Fear Glad Gloomy Hate Nervous Neutral Optimism Overwhelmed Unhappiness (positive) ( negative) (neutral)

and now we'll move on to the nouns that were written down that I considered to be closely associated with emotion: __**For every student polled:**__
 * =  ||= positive ||= negative ||= neutral ||= total words ||
 * = number of words written ||= 17 ||= 8 ||= 27 ||= 52 ||
 * = percentage ||= 33% ||= 15% ||= 52% ||= 100% ||

__**For students who claimed they were "happy":**__
 * =  ||= positive ||= negative ||= neutral ||= total words ||
 * = number of words written ||= 12 ||= 4 ||= 20 ||= 36 ||
 * = percentage ||= 33% ||= 11% ||= 56% ||= 100% ||

__**For students who claimed they were feeling "neutral":**__
 * =  ||= positive ||= negative ||= neutral ||= total words ||
 * = number of words written ||= 6 ||= 5 ||= 8 ||= 19 ||
 * = percentage ||= 32% ||= 26% ||= 42% ||= 100% ||

__**For students who claimed they were "sad":**__
 * =  ||= positive ||= negative ||= neutral ||= total words ||
 * = number of words written ||= 1 ||= 1 ||= -- ||= 2 ||
 * = percentage ||= 50% ||= 50% ||= -- ||= 100% ||

Words that were associated with emotions and their totals are listed below: Laughing - 7 Feelings - 5 Smiling - 5 Crying - 4 Friends - 3 Bipolar - 2 Frown - 2 Fun - 2 Relationships - 2 School - 2 Bubbly Differences Dwelling Expression Eyes Family Food Growth (Improvement) Homeless Joyful Life Moods Outbursts Personality Portrayal Tears Thoughts Yelling


 * (Posted by Vanessa) Why wouldn't yelling be a neutral word if outbursts is a neutral word? **
 * Let's say our school scored a touchdown, and I started yelling "Good Job" or "WOOO!" **
 * It would be the same thing as an outburst of joy, right? **
 * (Posted by Sarah Beitzel) I considered that a negative word because it has a negative connotation. I went back and forth with this one for a while, but I decided that outburts would be neutral because there are "outburtst of joy" as well as "outbursts of anger", though when I hear anyone refer to yelling it's always, "don't yell at me!" or "my teacher was yelling because we were not paying attention" (same goes for parents yelling for not having something done, or whatever suits your fancy.) I've never heard anyone exclaim that yelling was a good thing. Some of these are up for discussion, and I'm glad you saw that (: but yeah... that's why I decided it had to be negative. **