Research shows that the titles of Harlequin Romance novels closely align with women’s mating strategies such that themes of love, commitment, and reproduction are prevalent (Cox & Fisher, 2009). Here, we extend those findings by analyzing the text on the novels’ front and back covers using word frequency analysis and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Our analysis spanned 1,103 books of the flagship Harlequin Romance imprint, published between 2004 and 2022, all obtained from the Harlequin website. Replicating previous findings, the most frequently appearing title words are baby, bride, Christmas, and billionaire. When all cover text is considered, the most commonly occurring words are heart, love, man, family, baby, Christmas, wedding, and marriage. We then examined the cover text using LIWC. The text expressed positive emotionality more than negative emotionality. Also, the LIWC category of social issues scored the highest, driven by the family, male, and female subcategories. Furthermore, when LIWC scores for novels are correlated with Goodreads review ratings, we found a significant positive correlation between the categories of “analytic,” “they,” and “religion,” which, using speculation, suggests that couples may be carefully selecting a mate for marriage (which falls under the religion category).
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