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But the team’s large-scale analysis—drawing on billions of uses of more than 20,000 words and diverse real-world texts—demonstrates that this framework is flawed.
For decades, researchers have assumed that meaning could be distilled into three core emotional dimensions: valence (positive vs. negative), arousal (excited vs. calm), and dominance (controlling vs. submissive)—collectively known as the VAD framework.
At the heart of the discovery is a striking and far-reaching finding: human language is systematically biased toward safety.
The study, published May 6 in @science.org Advances, introduces “ousiometrics,” the quantitative study of essential meaning, and reveals that language is fundamentally organized not around emotion alone, but around a deeper structure shaped by power, danger, and order.
Using modern computational methods, the researchers—with support from the US National Science Foundation, Google, MassMutual, and other funders—identified a different set of underlying dimensions.
Researchers at the University of Vermont, led by VCSI Director @peterdodds.bsky.social, have uncovered a powerful new insight about how language works—one that overturns a cornerstone assumption in psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that has stood for more than 70 years.
The researchers show that meaning is best described by three independent dimensions: power (weak vs. powerful), danger (safe vs. dangerous), and structure (ordered vs. chaotic).