scholarly journals Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (30) ◽  
pp. e2102061118
Author(s):  
Johan Bollen ◽  
Marijn ten Thij ◽  
Fritz Breithaupt ◽  
Alexander T. J. Barron ◽  
Lauren A. Rutter ◽  
...  

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
Richard Parker

This book presents a compelling and accessible history of economic ideas, from Aristotle through the twentieth century. Examining theories of the past that have a continuing modern resonance, the book shows that economics is not a timeless, objective science, but is continually evolving as it is shaped by specific times and places. From Adam Smith's theories during the Industrial Revolution to those of John Maynard Keynes after the Great Depression, the book demonstrates that if economic ideas are to remain relevant, they must continually adapt to the world they inhabit. A lively examination of economic thought in historical context, the book shows how the field has evolved across the centuries.


2012 ◽  
Vol 164 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-156
Author(s):  
Jerzy BESTRY

The world is on the eve of change. Current economic recession surprisingly resembles the ”Great Depression” of 1929. The time will show whether the global society has drawn conclusions from the traumatic experiences of the last century. Historia magistra vitae est. In this article, the author makes a prediction concerning European social order based on the analysis of present-day socio-economic events and the circumstances preceding both the current economic crisis and the past one.


1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashid Amjad

First, an overview of the world economy to provide us with the stark evidence of the deep economic and social crisis which the world still faces despite the process of far reaching economic reforms and adjustments which many countries have undertaken over the past decade and a half, Global unemployment today, as a proportion of potential employment, is higher than at any time since the Great Depression. Of a world labour force estimated at 2.8 billion people, an estimated 30 per cent are not productively employed. More than 120 million people are registered as unemployed throughout the world, in that they seek and are available for work but cannot find it. An estimated 700 million people are underemployed, the ‘working poor’, and they form the bulk of the estimated 1.1 billion absolute poor in the world. With new entrants joining the labour force at an increasing rate, the pressures on the employment situation and poverty problem will further intensify in the coming years.


Corpora ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Craig Frayne

This study uses the two largest available American English language corpora, Google Books and the Corpus of Historical American English (coha), to investigate relations between ecology and language. The paper introduces ecolinguistics as a promising theme for corpus research. While some previous ecolinguistic research has used corpus approaches, there is a case to be made for quantitative methods that draw on larger datasets. Building on other corpus studies that have made connections between language use and environmental change, this paper investigates whether linguistic references to other species have changed in the past two centuries and, if so, how. The methodology consists of two main parts: an examination of the frequency of common names of species followed by aspect-level sentiment analysis of concordance lines. Results point to both opportunities and challenges associated with applying corpus methods to ecolinguistc research.


2000 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 79-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elif Akçetin

The effects of the Great Depression of 1929 on peasants in Turkey is an area of study that has remained neglected, despite the fact that peasants then constituted 75 percent of the population. The reason why the condition of peasants has not attracted much attention is the dramatic change between the economic policies of the 1920s and those of the 1930s. The immediate consequence of the stock-market crash and the sudden drop in prices was the shrinkage of international trade. Governments dealt with the depression by implementing quotas on imports, and liberal economic policies were no longer considered successful. Protectionism became the most popular policy for the management of economies in difficulty. The change in economic policies during this period constituted a break with the past and therefore has been the principal focus of studies on the Great Depression.


2019 ◽  
pp. 153-210
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck

This chapter recounts the early years of the Natchez Pilgrimage, a heritage tourism enterprise created by the Natchez Garden Club at the height of the Great Depression. The Pilgrimage dramatized a mix of decades-old southern racial ideology and white historical memory that was repackaged for 1930s consumption. Pilgrimage founder Katherine Miller and other leading clubwomen defined their community’s cultural image, while also redefining the meaning of traditional southern womanhood. The Pilgrimage is also the story of how one southern community’s selective expression of historical memory captivated white tourists eager to immerse themselves in the world of the Old South so vividly portrayed by popular writers and entertainers of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the Pilgrimage home tours and pageant suggests the power of popular culture to shape a tenacious historical memory that remained in force for much of the twentieth century and lingers even today.


Author(s):  
David J. Nelson

Near the end of the Great Depression, Florida ends the decade with a triumphant tenure at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, dozens of thriving tourist attractions, and a newly built Florida Park Service. By 1940, Florida enjoyed a thriving tourist industry that attracted more than double the entire population of the Sunshine State.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
GIULIANO CONTENTO DE OLIVEIRA ◽  
PAULO JOSÉ WHITAKER WOLF

ABSTRACT The paper aims to establish interfaces between the Great Depression of the 1930s under the Gold Standard and the recent European Crisis under the Euro. It is argued that, despite their specificities, both crises revealed the potentially harmful effects, in economic and social terms, of institutional arrangements that considerably reduce the autonomy of monetary, fiscal and exchange rate policies of participating countries, without being accompanied by increased cooperation between them, which should be led by a global (in the case of the Great Depression) or regional (in the case of the European Crisis) hegemonic power, which is not only capable of, but is also willing to act as a buyer and lender of last resort, especially in circumstances characterized by increased uncertainty, the deterioration of the general state of expectations and increased liquidity preference. In fact, central European countries in the past and peripheral European countries nowadays were effectively pushed toward deflationary adjustments in which a reduction of prices and wages was accompanied by a reduction of output and employment levels. Thus, in the absence of the possibility of restoring the autonomy of economic policy, the overcome of the crisis necessarily requires, both before - under the Gold Standard - and nowadays - under the Euro -, joint actions aimed to assure that the responsibility for the adjustment will be equally distributed among all the economies, in order to avoid that some of them benefit at the expense of the others in this process.


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