Researchers have used data from millions of tweets sent by people in the US on a single day to produce a map that tracks the nation’s mood minute-by-minute throughout the course of the day.
The researchers at Northeastern University in Boston used a form of ‘sentiment analysis’, identifying keywords that indicate pleasure or displeasure, to work out how happy or sad the tweets were.
They discovered – not especially surprisingly – that people were at their happiest early in the morning and later in the evening, with Sunday morning being the overall happiest time, and Thursday night the least happy. Mid-afternoon, as most people who work 9 to 5 jobs could probably have predicted, is the least happy time of the day.
On a state-by-state breakdown, residents of California, Miami and southern states among the most filled with the joys of life.
The researchers even produced a time-lapse video showing the nation’s shifting moods over a day, revealing the happy moods pulsating across the country’s time zones, from the east coast to the west coast and back again.
The researchers admit the findings are not terribly scientific – Twitter users are a small, not especially representative sample of the population, and tend to cluster around large cities – but the methods have the potential to provide real-time snapshots of people’s reactions to major events.
‘Even though individual tweets are pointless to anyone besides your followers, in aggregate there is a lot of meaningful information that can be an instrument to see how people feel about things, whether it’s public reaction to a politician’s speech or a consumer attitudes about a brand,’ said Sune Lehmann, one of the researchers.