
How to change emotions with a word: study (2018) - josephby
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21741543-science-looks-subtleties-semiotics-how-change-emotions-word
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pattisapu
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.

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zannaxy
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.

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jonahbenton
I don't have an Economist sub so can't read the whole piece and didn't bother
reading the paper but the strategy of using nouns rather than verbs seems very
familiar.

When writing this is called passive writing. In verbal communications when
trying to effect something is colloquially known as passive aggressiveness.

Defining new nouns as abstractions is also key to the practice of
dehumanization. None of this seems remotely novel.

I would be interested in studies that correlate brain activity with receiving
predominantly verb/active vs predominantly noun/passive communications. Maybe
the piece gets into work in that area, I don't know.

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heroprotagonist
This article is pay-walled.

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Lord_Baine
[https://pastebin.com/8MBzdbq0](https://pastebin.com/8MBzdbq0)

