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.
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.
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 researchers show that meaning is best described by three independent dimensions: power (weak vs. powerful), danger (safe vs. dangerous), and structure (ordered vs. chaotic).
Read the paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
And press: www.uvm.edu/uvmnews/news...
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.
vermontbiz.com/news/2026/ma...
Vermont Complex Systems Institute
Vermont Complex Systems Institute
Vermont Complex Systems Institute
Vermont Complex Systems Institute
Vermont Complex Systems Institute
Vermont Complex Systems Institute
Vermont Complex Systems Institute
Vermont Complex Systems Institute
Vermont Complex Systems Institute
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.
