Twitter Calls, "Oh Dear Happiness, Where Did You Go"

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 22 December 2011, 02:02 IST
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Bangalore: The New Years Eve marks the time of joy and happiness. But according to the study conducted by the University of Vermont on more than 60 million English speaking twitter users, the average happiness is finding its way down year after year.

After the Harvard study on Facebook users about its social influence, a team of scientists from Vermont under the lead of Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at UVM came forward with the facts about happiness.  According to the study based on twitter users, after the gradual increase in happiness which touched its peak in April 2009, the overall series is showing a gradual downward trend.

The research was done by collecting around 46 billion words “tweeted” by more than 63 million users in the last three years. These words are used to determine the feelings and relative mood of a large group of people. UVM used Mechanical Turk, a service from the Amazon. They hired a group of volunteers on the website to rate the sense of happiness and the emotional temperature on the scale of 1 to 10 and the volunteers rated say,  8.5 for ‘laughter’ and 1.3 for ‘terrorist’. The Vermont team then applied and calculated the average score of millions of words that they collected from twitter.

The researchers were able to interpret the changing patterns of words based on the date and time of the ‘tweets’. This also helped them to find out the moods of people depending on the various geographic regions. “It appears that happiness is going down” Dodds said. Or at least the happiness of people who is using twitter is going down. But this cannot be interpreted in one angle because Twitter has a universal impact.

The study also shows interesting facts like the happiness usually spikes around holidays and weekends and dips particularly around some negative news events. The data also points that twitter has gone more popular in the last two years. The researchers also made a happiness meter which is not available to the public now. So may be in the future, one can tell the mood of the city which passes by below, from a flight.

Let’s wait and see what twitter can do to bring more happiness into the lives of its worldwide users and of course, to the society.