Hedonometer

An online happiness gauge that searches blogs and tweets for mood-indicative words such as “proud” and “lonely.”

American scientists have pioneered a method of taking the emotional temperature of the blogosphere, Reuters reported:

Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist from the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, have created a “sensor” to mine 2.3 million blogs and gather sentences beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling.” Each sentence is then given a happiness score from 1 to 9 depending on a point system allocated to 1,034 words. For example, “triumphant” averages 8.87 points, “paradise” 8.72, “pancakes” 6.08, and “suicide” 1.25.

They said this “hedonometer” showed that the U.S. election day last November was the happiest day in four years with a spike in the word “proud” while the day of the “King of Pop’s” death was one of the unhappiest.

Discovery News quoted Peter Dodds who said:

We wanted to capitalize on the explosion of blogs and now Twitter to build an instrument that would give us some measure of the emotional signal from a large collective of people.

According to Reuters:

The scientists said that although blog writers tend to be younger and more educated than average, they were broadly representative of the U.S. population.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the hedonometer found that teenagers were the unhappiest group in the blogosphere, making disproportionate use of words such as: “sick,” “hate,” “stupid,” “sad,” “depressed,” “bored,” “lonely,” “mad,” and “fat.”