Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Love is a central theme in modern music, but do women andmen differ in their expressions of love? Results from empiri-cal studies on gender differences in love attitudes have evolvedfrom showing consistent differences to more similarities overtime and witnessed gender convergence in relationship expec-tations, housework responsibilities, and sexual attitudes. Inde-pendently, pop culture studies have shown how music can beused as a contextual artifact whose lyrics can reflect a culture’schanging psychological processes and ideologies. We combinethese two research areas to explore whether the gender con-vergence reported in psychological studies is mirrored in lovesongs. Using a corpus of lyrics and song metadata from 1960to 2009, we present a computational analysis of the lexical dis-tribution of lyrics across genre, gender and time. We show thatlove songs between vocalists who are men vs. women havebecome significantly more similar in their lyrical expressionsof love.