But in Cormac McCarthy's 2006 The Road, after a man's son narrowly avoids being eaten by rampaging cannibals, he says: "I should have been more careful."
A study of more than five million scanned books, fiction and non-fiction, has found a marked decline in the use of emotional words. Using the Google Ngram Viewer program to search for more than 600 words used to represent anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise, there was an increase only in the category of fear, and even then only after 1970. "In parallel to books, the 20th century saw the start of other media," explains Bristol University's Dr Alberto Acerbi. "Maybe these media - movies, radio, drama - had more emotional content than books."
The research, published in the journal PLOS One, found the ratio between joy and sadness varied greatly: peaking during the Roaring Twenties and again before the recent financial crash, but plunging at the height of World War II. But researchers were cautious about claiming this reflected wider social trends.
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