Positive evaluative words are more frequent and varied across languages, and pleasant material tends to be preferentially processed.
Boucher and Osgood's 1969 Pollyanna hypothesis, named from the 1913 novel, concerned the greater frequency and diversity of positive evaluative words across languages. The broader claim about preferential recall of pleasant material comes from a wider later literature and rests on separate evidence.
In practice
- Positive words outnumber negative across languages, which is the part Boucher and Osgood established.
- A team's account of a difficult project six months on is measurably kinder than the retrospective written the week it ended.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind