14 DAY TRIAL // Human feelings aren't exactly the easiest things to quantify, measure or study. Throughout the years countless methods have been tried, some with more success than others. Moreover, being able to measure the “happiness” levels of thousands, not to mention millions, of people at any given point in time with a reasonable degree of certainty has been mostly a dream. Until now, as Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, working in the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, have created a tool that “knows” how millions of people feel on any given day.
"The proliferation of personal online writing such as blogs gives us the opportunity to measure emotional levels in real time," the two scientists write in their study, "Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents," published in the Journal of Happiness Studies.
The two, one a mathematician the other a computer scientist, started with a site, wefeelfine.org, which scours the Internet looking for certain phrases. The software searches through some 2.3 million web sites looking for sentences beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling.” After gathering almost 10 million sentences they applied the findings of a previous study, Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW), which gave common English words a "psychological valence," to determine the happiness score of every sentence. The ANEW study asked participants to assign words on an unhappy to happy scale.
While their methods would seem a little too rigid and mathematical to determine something as subtle as human feelings, because of the scale of the study and the size of the texts they analyzed they believe the findings give an accurate measurement of the general state of happiness of a large group of people.
The study found that two recent events had made a large impression on the general public: the 2008 US election day was one of the happiest days for Americans, with a huge spike in words like “proud,” while the day of Michael Jackson's death and the following two were among the unhappiest in the period that the study extended on.