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, as of April 2013, 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.