Happiness Sensor Measures Mood via Tweets

Researchers in the US have revealed that the “hedonometer” or happiness sensor is a tool that is, for all intents and purposes a happiness sensor. The project went live at www.hedonometer.com on Tuesday.

Why make use of tweets

Only 15% of adults in the United States use Twitter, the social networking site. And for the rest of the world, the percentage is probably lower. However, the researchers have chosen to use the social networking platform because it is “becoming more and more representative.” In December 2012, Twitter had 200 million active users.

At this point, the hedonometer is making assessments from English tweets. However, researchers are saying that they will soon be making use of information coming through other data streams such as blogs, Bitly, CNN, The New York Times, and Google Trends. The hedonometer will also be making sense of data in languages other than English. The target so far is to be able to analyze data streams in 12 languages.

Five years of data collection

For the past five years, the project has been evaluating the moods that are expressed in real-time on Twitter. The research group makes use of the Twitter Gardenhose feed. This tool has been collecting data from the micro-blogging platform and can make sense of the mood of any location – a city, or even a whole country. The hedonometer is an analytics program that looks at 10% of the tweets that are put out there in English and most of the posts are in the United States. The tool works in real time.

Chris Danforth developed the site with Peter Dodds. Both men are mathematicians at the University of Vermont. According to Danforth the research group is developing a measure of well-being. The proponents of the study say that they prefer to make use of the expressions that people post online and in effect measure an important aspect.

Happiest days

Every day, the research team collects 50 million tweets from all around the world. They calculate the happiness score from certain words. The tool zeroes in on the “psychological valence” of around 10,000 words. There is a scale used from one to nine. For example, ”cherry” has a score of 7.4, “hahaha” is 7.94, and “happy” has a rank of 8.30. On the other hand, “jail” is 1.76 and “war” is 1.80 and “crash” has rating of 2.60. In five days, the happiest days recorded by the tool are on holidays, particularly Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The saddest day by far

This tool was able to make sense of the overall mood of the Internet community on the day of the Boston Marathon bombings. This day has been identified as the saddest day in five years time. The measurement tool for global happiness determined that on that day, there was a marked decline in positive phrases such as “hahaha” and an increase in the volume of negative words such as “tragedy,” “sad,” and “news.”

The next saddest day that came out of this analysis was the day of the massacre at the school in Newton, Connecticut.