If You're Happy, Then We Know It: New Research Measures Mood

University of Vermont scientists have developed a system for measuring the collective happiness in the blogging and online writing community. Vermont professors Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth have developed a remote-sensing mechanism capable of recording how millions of people around the world were feeling on any particular day. The researchers' system mines through about 2.3 million blogs, looking for sentences that start with phrases such as "I feel" or "I am feeling." Then, using a standardized psychological valence of words established by the Affective Norms for English Words, each sentence is given a happiness score on a scale from one to nine. Even words not directly related to feelings, such as pancakes, vanity, and lazy, receive scores. "It's like measuring the temperature. You don't care where the atoms are," Dodds says. "You want to know the temperature of this room or this town. It's a coarser scale. We're interested in the collective story." The researchers say that although blog writers are generally younger and more educated than average, they offer a broad representative of the U.S. population, with bloggers distributed throughout the country and evenly split between genders and race. Many blogs also are connected to demographic data, enabling the researchers to measure the happiness of different groups, such as people under a certain age in a certain state. The method also can be applied to other forms of written text, including song lyrics, presidential speeches, and Twitter messages.

Full article : http://www.uvm.edu/outreach/?Page=News&storyID=14590