Researchers find overall decline in mood words over the last 100 years, though “fear” words seem to be doing well these days.
Link.
It seems like they’re comparing us to the romantic period, though. A period literally characterized by unusually high amounts of emotive expressiveness. I wonder how we compare to, say, the rationality focused Enlightenment.
My wife blames Freud for making us so self-aware that we can’t express even our most transient feelings for fear of others reading too much into them. She says he ruined fiction because of it, too, because you can’t write anything without some English major finding a subtext in it.
Sounds like your wife wasn’t hugged enough as a child.