How Male and Female Literary Authors Write About Affect Across Cultures and Over Historical Periods

Abstract

A wealth of literature suggests the existence of sex differences in how emotions are experienced, recognized, expressed, and regulated. However, to what extent these differences result from the put in place of stereotypes and social rules is still a matter of debate. Literature is an essential cultural institution, a transposition of the social life of people but also of their intimate affective experiences, which can serve to address questions of psychological relevance. Here, we created a large corpus of literary fiction enriched by authors' metadata to measure the extent to which culture influences how men and women write about emotion. Our results show that even though before the twenty-first century and across 116 countries women more than men have written about affect, starting from 2000, this difference has diminished substantially. Also, in the past, women's narratives were more positively laden and less arousing. While the difference in arousal is ubiquitous and still present nowadays, sex differences in valence vary as a function of culture and have dissolved in recent years. Altogether, these findings suggest that historic evolution is associated with men and women writing similarly about emotions and reveal a sizable impact of culture on the affective characteristics of the lexicon.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00219-9.

Keywords: Affect; Arousal; Cross-cultural; Literature; Sex differences; Valence.

Fig. 1

Corpus composition. In panel a, we report on the left the distribution of the 1,365 authors across countries, and, on the right, a pie-chart across continents. Panel b depicts the composition of author sex across time, with male authors in red and female writers in green. In panels c–g, we represent graphs resulting from the stylometric analysis, where each dot maps a specific author and edges connect authors with similar use of words. Panel c depicts the continent of origin of the authors with the same color coding as panel a. Author sex, historical period, language, and being awarded literary prizes are shown in panels d to g, respectively

Fig. 2

The distribution of sex differences in literature across semantic domains. Words demonstrating a significant sex effect are represented in a 2D t-SNE map obtained from word2vec word embeddings. Terms were grouped based on eleven semantic Wordnet domains. Each dot represents a word and is color-coded depending on whether it is used more frequently by male or female authors. In gray, words showing significant sex * historical period interaction effect. Graphs report sex differences (Cohens’d) over time across semantic domains. Negative values represent a higher frequency in females, whereas positive ones in males. Shaded color areas represent 95% confidence intervals, and the dashed black line marks gender equality in the use of terms. An interactive map of terms showing significant differences between the sexes, and their distribution in time and across countries is available at: https://www.sane-elab.eu/litemo/welcome.php

Fig. 3

Valence and arousal of terms showing sex differences, and sentiment analysis of writings. Panels a and b map valence and arousal ratings (Warriner et al., 2013) of words showing a significant sex effect on the 2D t-SNE representation. Panels c and d show that female authors use more positive and less arousing terms. In box plots, each dot is a significant word also present in the Warriner database (n = 339), and the dark-gray shaded area shows the 95% confidence intervals of the SE of the mean, while the light-gray area is the SD. Panels e and f show the timecourse of valence and arousal in books by males and females computed on the entire Warriner database (n = 13,915). Shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals of the estimation across authors. While sex differences in arousal remained stable across centuries, differences in valence have decreased over the last two decades. In panel g, we report the relation between affective dimensions across authors (i.e., each dot represents an author). The negative relationship between valence and arousal (i.e., writings with lower valence are also higher in arousal) is more pronounced in male as compared to female authors

Fig. 4

Positive and negative terms in male and female authors. Panel a reports the frequency of positive (n = 620) and negative (n = 743) terms in the corpus using LIWC, and each dot maps the frequency (in percentage) of each word across authors. In our corpus, there is a higher proportion of positive emotions compared to negative ones (mean ± se; positive terms 2.06% ± .01%; negative: 1.75% ± .01%). The dashed line in the violin plots represents the same analysis conducted using the corpus obtained from Google Books (frequency of positive terms: 2.28%; negative: 1.73%). Panels b and c show the sex difference for positive and negative words, respectively. Each gray dot represents a male or female author