Love, Hope, Perspective, and Leadership in the Ngram Database: Solace for Modern Times

The Ngram database allows searches that identify words that are top of mind in a culture at a specific time. We used this database to discover the character strengths that have been loudest in the conversation of the American English publication record during the last 100 years, and in particular in 2019. Love, perspective, and leadership have been increasing since 1920 and hope has been increasing since 1987. Results suggest that these character strengths could be increased even more with greater emphasis upon them. The Ngram database was used to filter the 24 constructs identified by Peterson and Seligman (2004) perhaps identifying four of the most important constructs now and ever.


Introduction
Depression rates are increasing since 2005 (Weinberger et al., 2017) and the media and politicians in the United States often engage in divisive rhetoric. To counter these effects, we sought to identify character strengths that are prominent in the United States literature and also to predict changes in these character strengths in the future. More specifically, we sought to see what character strengths were prominent, since they could be amplified further to counter the negative influences of pessimism and despondency. Peterson and Seligman (2004) oversaw a comprehensive examination of six core values ("wisdom and knowledge", courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence) and 24 character strengths (e.g., perspective) nested under these core values. For data we used Google's Ngram Viewer database (Aiden & Michel, 2013; How to cite this paper: Zywiak, W. H., & Niu, G. (2021 Zywiak, Bobroff, & Niu, 2021). Aiden and Michel (2013) introduced the world to Google's Ngram Viewer through a best-selling book and a Science article (Michel et al., 2011a). The Ngram database includes words and phrases, up to 5 words, from books created between 1500 and 2019. These words and phrases are anchored to the year of publication. Sources include over 5 million books. The Ngram software plots the frequency of a given word across a selected time span. The authors have been having undergraduate students in statistics courses use this database to conduct and interpret regression analyses and lagged correlation analyses. The sheer volume of the dataset allows students to conduct analyses on terms that are of interest to them. This data is open access and is available if you google Ngram Viewer. Aiden and Michel (2013) previously focused on fame (see 4.4. in the discussion), tragedies (Lusitania, Pearl Harbor), war (the U.S. Civil War, the Great War, World War II), and diseases (e.g., cancer, TB, diabetes, heart attack, Michel et al., 2011b). Aiden and Michel's focus on negative concepts and our focus on positive concepts, parallels psychology's original focus on psychopathology (e.g., the work of Freud) and the balance of a focus on positive aspects of the mind by third force psychologists (Maslow, 1943;Rogers, 1961).

Method
In this paper we used a single corpus which is the typical approach in Ngram studies. We used the corpus of American English, based on familiarity. The raw data were the frequencies of the 24 character strengths. Peterson & Seligman (2004) and colleagues conducted an exhaustive and comprehensive review of character strengths explicated in historical literature (e.g., religious texts, philosophy, and more recently psychology). In a few cases we used synonyms if the term used by Peterson and Seligman contained more than one word ("appreciation of beauty and excellence" was replaced with "aesthetics") or the term had prominent different meanings ("citizenship" was replaced with "civics"). Data were retrieved from Ngram Viewer from 1920 through 2019 every 5 years, including 2019 (i.e., 21 data points). We chose a period of 99 years, since the most recent easily accessed data includes 2019, 100 years is a very common time frame for retrospectives in America (Moore & Pitlor, 2015;Peter Pauper Press, 2009;Winkowski & Sullivan, 1998) and Aiden and Michel (2013) used 100 years for many of their ngram graphs. We set smoothing to zero to be able to view the pattern in the raw data. Six digits after the last leading zero were recorded. We first determined the four most prevalent character strengths as of 2019 and these were: love, hope, perspective, and leadership. These fell under the core values of humanity, transcendence, "wisdom and knowledge", and justice, respectively. Data were analyzed using regression analyses in SPSS 26.

Results
The year was used to predict the frequency of each term. We multiplied the Ngram percentages by 10,000 (and dropped the %) to avoid rounding errors on the beta weights in the resulting regression models, and so we could report frequency per million words following the convention of Aiden and Michel (2013), please see Figure 1. A linear transformation: adding or multiplying the dependent variable by a constant does not affect the p-value or R 2 . Significant results were found for three of the four terms (all but hope) and these are reported in and sex (as a behavior)] represents 30.6%, and philia, or friendship, represents Figure 1. Love, hope, perspective, leadership: frequency per million words by yea.  9.1%. Pragma, ludus, and philautia, represent 6.7%, 3.6%, and 0.5%, respectively.
Pragma is evident in marriages that last decades, or mature love. Ludus refers to playful love, or flirtation. Philautia refers to being able to love yourself (so that you can love others, Kzarnic, 2011). All of these contribute to the sustainability of society, but agape and eros are getting the greatest emphasis in the American English corpus.

Hope
The data from Figure 1 suggest that "hope" enters a tailspin in the early seventies. We take a more fine-grained look at this pattern by plotting annual data

Perspective
There are various dimensions that can be used to typify perspective. The humanistic psychologist Maslow (1943) describes five sets of goals 1) physiological (e.g., food and water) 2) safety 3) love 4) esteem (achievement, adequacy, confidence, reputation, and prestige) and 5) self-actualization (to be the best at what one is best at, to give to one's community). When each successive basic need is met, the person can pursue higher needs to a greater extent. Eckhart Tolle's (2004) "The Power of Now" is all about maintaining perspective. Neurologically, one can see the distinction between the reptile brain and the cerebral cortex. In this context addictive behavior can be seen as a short cut to activating the reward system (e.g., the limbic system) in an anti-evolutionary way. The limbic system developed to help animals thrive, and in the case of humans to thrive within the society and to help the society thrive. Triggering the reward system through addictive behavior sabotages the reason for the limbic system. Another dimension that can be considered in the context of perspective is geographical and is defined by these areas: individual, couple, household, community, state, nation, and globe. For instance, many industries may be wonderful for a nation's economy, but terrible for the climate of earth. In Ngram Viewer, the term perspective eclipses leadership during the last few years, suggesting the impact of globalization, and possibly the evolution of human consciousness.

Leadership
The term leadership increases consistently during the last 100 years. It should be DOI: 10.4236/jss.2021.911013 164 Open Journal of Social Sciences noted that this may not be applauding good leadership, but may be critiquing current leaders. The characteristics necessary for a good leader will be determined to some extent by the organization s/he is leading. A good president, will be different than a good pope, who will be different than a good general. In some ways, a good leader must emanate the epitome of characteristics that the specific organization holds valuable. Other great leadership characteristics may generalize across different types of organizations. Aiden and Michel (2013)  Leadership is a focus of many bestsellers and these include Sun Tzu's (2005) The Art of War, Valerian Albanov's (2000) In the Land of White Death, Dale Carnegie's (1936) How to Win Friends and Influence People, Stephen Covey's (1989) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Jim Collins's (2001) Good to Great.

Conclusion
The good news is that the four most prominent character strengths are increas-