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Scientists tracked people's emotions by measuring changes in facial muscles linked with smiling (pictured) and found the most positive letter is 'i'

The words you use can have a powerful effect on people, but new research suggests its not the words themselves that carry meaning, but instead its the individual letters.

And researchers from Germany found the articulation of vowels, in particular, influence how we feel.

During tests, they tracked participants' emotions by measuring changes in facial muscles linked with smiling and frowning, and found the most positive letter is 'i'.

Meanwhile, the letter that holds the most negative connotations is 'o'.

The team, led by the Erfurt-based psychologist Professor Ralf Rummer and the Cologne-based phoneticist Professor Martine Grice were able to demonstrate the articulation of vowels systematically influences our feelings, but also vice versa.

The research project looked at the question of whether, and to what extent, the meaning of words is linked to their sound.

The specific focus of the project was on two special cases; the sound of the long 'i' vowel (/i:/) and that of the long, closed 'o' vowel (/o:/).

Professors Rummer and Grice were particularly interested in finding out whether these vowels tend to occur in words that are positively or negatively charged in terms of emotional impact.

In the first experiment, the researchers asked test subjects to watch film clips designed to put them in a positive or a negative mood, and then asked them to make up ten artificial words themselves, and to speak these out loud.

They found the artificial words that contained significantly more '/i:/'s than '/o:/'s when the test subjects were in a positive mood.

Scientists found that the letter that holds the most negative connotations is 'o', having tracked people's emotions by measuring changes in their facial muscles while frowining (pictured). The letter 'o' more often occurs in negative words, such as 'alone'

The second experiment was used to determine whether the different emotional quality of the two vowels can be traced back to the movements of the facial muscles associated with their articulation.

Participants were asked to articulate an 'i' sound, which contracts the zygomaticus major muscle linked with smiling, or an 'o' sound, which contracts the frowning orbicularis oris muscle, every second while watching cartoons.

The test subjects producing the 'i' sounds found the same cartoons significantly more amusing than those producing the 'o' sounds instead.

The conclude that the tendency for 'i' sounds to occur in positively charged words, such as 'like', and for 'o' sounds to occur in negatively charged words, such as 'alone', in many languages appears to be linked to the corresponding use of facial muscles.

With the articulation of vowels on the one hand and the expression of emotion on the other.

The results were published in Emotion, the journal of the American Psychological Association.