Image Source: TIME
 

BY AUSTIN FAX

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Happiness-- in 140 characters or less. It may sound strange, but researchers from Cornell now say they can give a gauge of how the world is feeling-- simply by taking to Twitter.

NBC’s Erika Edwards gives us the low down on the study.


“At any given moment, someone, somewhere is Tweeting about what they are doing or feeling. The tweets go into cyberspace, where they are recorded into a massive archive of what makes us tick. Golder and a colleague developed a computer program that analyzed over a half-billion Tweets looking for specific words like happy to measure mood and curse words, even emoticons--like smiley faces.”



So what did we learn from the hash-tags and re-Tweets? Time Magazine’s Bryan Walsh reports people are happier in the mornings and progressively moodier as the day goes on. The weekends are also a high source of happiness on Twitter. But didn’t we already know that?


“Work probably does play a role in driving our mood. Global emotions tended to hit an overall low on Monday afternoons before steadily rising and peaking on the weekends — although you could have learned that by listening to Rebecca Black.”


So, is this simply common sense? Maybe not. A blogger for Discover Magazine points out studies have been a little fickle.


“Most of these studies involved small numbers of American undergraduates [and] these small samples and imprecise measures might explain why the results have been so inconsistent. … Twitter was an obvious way of circumventing these problems.”


This is the second Twitter study to address mood, but the first to be published worldwide. The New York Times’ Benedict Carey says the results are telling, but there still might be a few kinks to work out.


“On Twitter, people routinely savage others with pure relish and gush sarcastically — and the software is not sophisticated enough to pick up these subtleties. [Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert] said, ‘I suspect that if you counted the good and bad words people said during intercourse, you’d mistakenly conclude that they were having an awful time.’”
 

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