According to new research, when the economy starts to stink, authors start to adopt a more depressing vocabulary. That's right, all the books you've been reading as of late sound a tad bit miserable.

A recent study out of London took different "mood words" and broke it up into six categories: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.

The researchers then made a "literary misery index" to gauge the relative number of positive moods against the negative moods in 20th century books.

Books released after periods of economic distress use language that reflect a general malaise. Books from the 1930s and 1970s era saw an explosion of downer books. From the new study:
Visually, the literary misery index seems to respond to major phases of the 20th century: literary misery increased after the economic Depression, then declined after the post-War years, then rose again after the recession of the 1970s, and declined again following on from the economics recovery of the late 1980s.

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"When we looked at millions of books published in English every year and looked for a specific category of words denoting unhappiness, we found that those words in aggregate averaged the authors' economic experiences over the past decade," Professor Alex Bentley of the University of Bristol, a lead author of the new study said in a statement.

"In other words, global economics is part of the shared emotional experience of the 20th century," Bentley explained.

How will this affect our moods then? A study is needed for this!

[Smithsonian]