London - A “happiness index” that measures the mood of the world on any given day can now be accessed online.
Visit www.hedonometer.org and you can see a wavy line plotted on a graph that rises and falls. The peaks and troughs represent the averaged-out emotional state of tens of millions of people.
A team of US scientists constructed the hedonometer from data obtained from the social messaging site Twitter. About 50 million tweets from around the world are collected each day and analysed for “happy”, “sad” and “neutral” word content.
Words are assigned scores with the happiest and most positive placed at the top of a one to nine scale. From this, an average happiness rating is calculated.
“Reporters, policymakers, academics – anyone – can come to the site and see population-level responses to major events,” said Dr Chris Danforth, from the University of Vermont, one of two US mathematicians who developed the hedonometer.
“Our instrument reflects a kind of quantitative macro-story, one that journalists can use to bring big data into an article attempting to characterise the public response to the incident.”
The hedonometer is based on a psychological assessment of about 10 000 words. The scientists assigned an overall score to each word. The word “happy” itself scored 8.30, “hahaha” 7.94, “cherry” 7.04 and the more neutral “pancake” 6.96. At the bottom, “crash” scored 2.60, “war” 1.80 and “jail” 1.76.
Currently the hedonometer is updated every 24 hours, but further development could see billions of words collected daily to provide a minute-by-minute barometer of global happiness. – Irish Independent