Prof. Minue Kim (Department of Psychology) Tracks the ‘Emotional Changes’ in K-pop Lyrics

- Frequency Analysis of morpheme in lyrics that has positive/negative meaning

- In the recent three decades, positivity ↑, negativity ↓ - Opposite trend compared to the West

▲ Prof. Minue Kim (SKKU Department of Psychology) / Prof. Wonkwang Jo (SNU Graduate School of Public Health)

Prof. Minue Kim (Department of Psychology)’s research team has announced a research result that the emotions and sentiments included in lyrics of K-pop hit songs have changed consistently. Prof. Kim published such research in the psychology field’s international academic journal, Emotion. (IF: 5.56)

Popular songs, especially so-called hits that many people enjoy, contain emotions that members of society prefer and experience. Therefore, by analyzing K-pop hits, we can see how the emotional preference of Koreans have changed, and how this aspect is related to the social and cultural changes in Korea.

The international status of K-pop has risen significantly in recent years, and it is no longer the exclusive property of domestic fans as it became worthy of its title, mainstream music. As more people over the world enjoy listening to K-pop, researching K-pop hits has become to have more global implications.

Prof. Kim’s research team employed Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm and text mining to analyze the emotions behind the lyrics of K-pop hit songs. To be specific, the frequency of positive/negative morphemes in song lyrics was analyzed, and used computational and scientific techniques such as 'topic modeling' to identify how many topics containing specific emotions exist.

As a result of almost 3000 K-pop hit songs that have reached the Top 100 charts of Melon starting from the 1990s to 2019, the research team confirmed a trend where more positivity is included in lyrics and a constant decrease in negativity in the last three decades. Surprisingly, this trend is very opposite to the emotional change trend shown in Western hit songs, within the same time period, including US and UK.

The research team said that this stark difference is due to changes in Korea's socio-cultural characteristics over the past 30 years. In the U.S. and Britain, having originally individualistic cultures, individualistic tendencies became stronger, highlighting the shortcomings of individualistic cultures such as narcissism and selfishness, and this fact is reflected as negative emotions in the lyrics of hit songs.

On the other hand, over the past 30 years in Korea, originally a collectivist culture, the advantages of individualism culture are shown on the front, such as encouraging efforts to achieve individual dreams and goals. K-pop hits also reveal more positive emotions that contain individual confidence and pride. Aligned with this, it is interpreted that Korea's economic power and purchasing power, which grew rapidly at the same time, also influenced the more positive emotions contained in the lyrics of K-pop hit songs.

This study has the implication that results with socio-cultural implications can be derived through calculation and scientific analysis of natural language databases such as song lyrics. This research was conducted in cooperation with Prof. Wonkwang Jo of Seoul National University Graduate School of Public Health.

※ Paper Title: Tracking emotions from song lyrics: Analyzing 30 years of K-pop hits

※ Journal: Emotion

※ DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001185