futurejournalismproject: Global Mood Swings,...

Global Mood Swings, Measured With Tweets

Cornell University researchers analyzed Twitter posts from around the globe to study the collective mood of people across cultures.

What they found is that we’re mostly the same. Via the study:

We found that individuals awaken in a good mood that deteriorates as the day progresses—which is consistent with the effects of sleep and circadian rhythm—and that seasonal change in baseline positive affect varies with change in daylength.

As the New York Times explains, using Twitter and other social networks for such analysis has its limitations.

“Tweets may tell us more about what the tweeter thinks the follower wants to hear than about what the tweeter is actually feeling,” Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, tells the Times.

Also via the New York Times:

The study’s authors, Scott A. Golder and Michael W. Macy, acknowledge such limitations and worked to correct for them. In the study, they collected up to 400 messages from each of 2.4 million Twitter users writing in English, posted from February 2008 through January 2010. They performed text analysis on each message, using a standard computer program that associates certain words, like “awesome” and “agree,” with positive moods and others, like “annoy” and “afraid,” with negative states. They included so-called emoticons, the face symbols like “:)” that punctuate digital missives. The researchers gained access to the messages through Twitter, using an interface that allows scientists as well as software developers to work with the data.

The pair found that about 7 percent of the users qualified as “night owls,” showing peaks in upbeat-sounding messages around midnight and beyond, and about 16 percent were morning people, who showed such peaks very early in the day. After accounting for these differences, the researchers determined that for the average user in each country, positive posts crested around breakfast time, from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.; they fell off gradually until hitting a trough between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., then drifted upward, rising more sharply after dinner.

Another global similarity: Weekend time is fun time.