FIGURE 6-8
Using z Scores as a Standardization Tool in Research
Acerbi, Lampos, Garnett, and Bentley (2013) used Google Ngram to look at patterns in the use of emotion-related words in literature over time. They found that, in general, the prevalence of emotion-related words used in the 30 million books catalogued in Google books has decreased over the past century. The one exception was words related to “fear.” This graph plots z scores to allow for the comparison of different emotion words. For example, if fear-related words were more common overall than disgust-related words, the lines would be far apart, making comparisons of trend lines difficult.