Twitter mood maps reveal emotional states of America
Posted on July 23rd, 2010 by Michael
The mood of the nation at midday and 11 pm EST (Alan Mislove/Sune Lehmann/Yong-Yeol Ahn/Jukka-Pekka Onnela/J. Niels Rosenquist, 2010)
Emotional words contained in 300 million tweets suggest that the West Coast is happier than the East Coast, and across the country happiness peaks each Sunday morning, with a trough on Thursday evenings, computer scientists at Northeastern University have found, describing the technique as “the pulse of the nation.”
To glean mood from the 140-character-long messages, they filtered the tweets to find ones that contained words included in a psychological word-rating system called Affective Norms for English Words – a low-scoring word on ANEW is considered negative, a high-scoring one positive.
August 5th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
The marketing brains of big Co’s could use this to plan when to contact customers. But who would enjoy sales calls at home on Sunday morning?
July 23rd, 2010 at 9:55 am
I imagine continued bliss would drive me mad. I have heard it said some folks are not happy unless they are whinging or carping about something or other. Complete happiness must dull the senses.JMD