from Hacker News

How to change emotions with a word: study (2018)

by josephby on 10/14/19, 11:28 AM with 6 comments

  • by pattisapu on 10/14/19, 2:58 PM

    To a native English speaker like myself, perhaps the thing most different about classical Sanskrit is the heavy use of nouns and nominalizations (participles and so on). Coupled with other things like the passive voice, I wonder if the "courtly" or "elegant" effect sought out was something like these researchers have been studying. (Perhaps Samuel Johnson's style has something of this in English.)

    Contrast the Strunk, White, Orwell et al. approach of directness and writing with verbs. I have often preferred that approach throughout my life, and appreciate reading writers who employ that approach.

    Yet as I get older, I find myself in more and more situations in which I am read and perceived as confrontational, difficult, or accosting, to an extent that I rarely want. The main dynamics of particular situations aside, I wonder if too much brushstroke with verbs did not help my cause.

    Also, it may be worth noting, as Gertrude Stein put it: Sentences are not emotional, but paragraphs are.

  • by zannaxy on 10/14/19, 2:30 PM

    This is a very interesting point, "removal" instead of "removing" but if you are only stringing nouns together you are speaking babyspeak. Country Protection President Military Borders -- what is this babble? It sounds like the researchers stumbled onto a different idea, which I don't have a name for, but it's the one where you try to avoid vocalizing what you don't want and only express what you do want. If you have to change verbs into nouns, you have to either remove the negation from the verb, or choose the opposite-meaning noun. Like "stop killing" would be "life saving" and then noun'ing that. But the operation of going from verb-> noun necessarily means you have to frame it in a positive way. Plus, how are you going to know what someone's associations with a particular word are? You might trigger them with the word ice or fed when you're just talking about lunch.

  • by heroprotagonist on 10/14/19, 9:23 PM

    This article is pay-walled.