14 DAY TRIAL // Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter have recently been used by scientists to gain insights into a variety of aspects related to modern society. In the latest such work, experts showed how the messages posted on the micro-blogging website could reveal trends in overall happiness levels.
What is interesting about this work is that researchers admitted from the start that they might fail. Tweets only have 140 characters, which is nowhere nearly enough for someone to express even a common emotion. However, this issue was circumvented by assigning different values to key words.
An additional method used to circumvent the limitation posed by the very nature of Twitter was to use a massive number of messages. Researchers tracked posts uploaded to the website between September 9, 2008 and September 18, 2011, a total of 4.6 billion tweets.
For practical reasons – and to avoid being lost in translation – the team only used posts by English speakers. After each of the posts was scanned for the aforementioned key words, the team could extract statistical trends in overall happiness levels in the general population.
The team figured that Saturdays, Novembers and Decembers, and early mornings were the happiest moments for the majority of people. At the same time, the month of January, late-nights and the first couple of days of every week were the worst for most, in terms of happiness.
However, the general mood can also be influenced by external factors, such as royal marriages, celebrity marriages and death, individual events such as birthdays, and holidays and vacations, experts at the University of Vermont explain.
The research, which appears in the December 7 online issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLoS ONE, also shows that the recent trend is a very gloomy one, LiveScience reports.
“After a gradual upward trend that ran from January to April, 2009, the overall time series has shown a gradual downward trend, accelerating somewhat over the first half of 2011,” the team explains.
When it came to analyzing daily happiness, the team determined that it peaked at around 5 to 6 am, only to drop to its lowest levels around 10 pm or 11 pm. During the night, happiness began to rise again. These results are not in tune with others obtained analyzing networking sites such as Facebook.
“There is an important psychological distinction between an individual's current, experiential happiness and their longer-term, reflective evaluation of their life, and in using Twitter, our approach is tuned to the former kind,” the team concludes.