Finally! How Time Lapse in Nobel Prize Reception Affects Emotionality in the Nobel Prize Banquet Speeches

We have a limited understanding of the role emotions play in academia. Exploring emotions consistently and comparably is challenging as contextual factors play a powerful role. However, we find an interesting setting to empirically investigate the emotional response in academia through looking at Nobel Prize winners. Scientists who hope to earn a Nobel Prize are pressured by their environment if they have not yet received the Prize. Although there are various signs that indicate that the Nobel Prize is coming, the “when” question sits deep inside the minds of those leading candidates. Waiting for the Nobel Prize is, therefore, emotionally draining. We would therefore expect that they would experience a greater sense of relief when finally receiving the award. From these expectations, we are therefore interested in measuring their level of emotionality after receiving the Nobel Prize. To measure this, we explore in this study with a linguistic content analysis, the level of emotional positivity in their Nobel Prize banquet speech. Banquet speeches are an excellent setting as they provide a consistent and controlled setting to compare emotionality across scientists, and over time, as we can measure the same responses to the same recognition under the same circumstances. We expect that waiting longer for the Nobel Prize increases the positive emotionality of the Nobelists’ speeches. The waiting time is measured by calculating the years since the Nobel Prize-winning work was done. Through undertaking this time lapse study, we indeed find a robust positive correlation; and find that those scientists who waited longer for the Nobel Prize report higher levels of positive emotions during their Banquet speeches.