From time to time we feel happier than at other
times depending on the up and downs in our individual lives. But some of those up
and downs are shared with large sections of the population and depend on the
politicians and financial conjurors that we have in place. These days we let off
steam with Tweets to all our cyber friends. The twittering increases daily.
Dodds et al
have been doing a lot of listening lately (1). They’ve kept their ears to the
ground for a period of 3 years, listening to 63 million of us tweeters. Of
course, they didn’t sit at their computer screens for this epic adventure. They
used their computers to do the job for them and they analyzed the Tweets for
words that indicated the degree of happiness of those that were Twittering.
This was no mean feat as they used a database of
10,000 individually graded words, but it meant that they were able to monitor
the degree of happiness of the population that they were sampling. The study
period was from September, 2008 to August this year.
Happiness spiked on notable days like Valentine’s
Day, Easter, New Year’s Eve, Christmas and Independence Day, but there was a
slight trend up during 2008, followed by a fairly level period until a decline
over the past year. Not a surprise to most of us.
The TGI Friday feeling is alive and well. There was
a weekly peak in the average happiness rating on Fridays and Saturdays. Sundays
was already diving down towards the Monday level.
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