Emotion and Ageing in Discourse: Do Older People Express More Positive Emotions?

Abstract Several psychological lab studies have shown that older people feel more positive emotions than younger people. So far, however, there has been little research on whether older people also express more positive emotions in their discourse. This paper reports the findings of sentiment analysis from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014) across 10 age groups, with details on eight emotions (anticipation, joy, surprise, trust, anger, disgust, sadness, and fear), followed by structural topic modelling to reveal the thematic concerns of different age groups. This research generally supports earlier psychological lab studies that the older generation’s discourse is more positive than that of the younger generation; however, the findings also show that positive and negative emotions fluctuate over the life span, with pronounced dips in overall positivity in the 20s, 40s, and 60s. Subsequent structural topic modelling explains why people are more positive or negative at certain ages.