Taking a Fairy Tale's Emotional Temperature

Many emotions lie on the pages between "Once upon a time" and "happily ever after." Some are happy gems, while others are sure to provoke nightmares. So when you crack open a storybook, how are you to know what feelings you'll find? A new tool cuts out the guesswork by taking a story's "emotional temperature." The data-mining tool was designed by a computer science researcher in Canada, who analyzed everything from the Brothers Grimm to Shakespeare in the digital Google Books Corpus. The tool tallies the use of 14,200 words associated with eight basic feelings---joy, sadness, anger and fear, along with trust, disgust, surprise and anticipation---to come up with the emotion thermometer, giving a better idea of stories' emotional content than just generic genres or keywords alone. Shakespeare's Hamlet, the researcher found, is heavy on the fear and disgust, whereas As You Like It shows more joy and trust. The ...