Twitter Tweets the World's Mood
Do you wake up ready to conquer the world and then crash and burn mid-morning? Well you may not be alone.
A new study by Cornell University researchers confirms that people tend to wake up in a good mood and are the happiest on weekends. But it's not just Americans. Researchers examined the content of over 500 million Twitter messages written by 2.4 people in 84 countries over the past two years. The study in the journal Science looked for signs of good moods - happy, enthusiastic, brilliant - and bad moods - sad, anxious, fear.
They found that most people's positive attitudes are reborn with each day and again when we go home to see friends and family. In between, our attitudes progressively worsen before the afternoon. But it's not just work-related stress that causes the dip in attitudes. The study also discovered that we're happiest on the weekends, but the same mid-morning dip occurs indicating there could be an universal biological reason relating to circadian rhythms or sleep patterns.
"Night owls," or people more active at night, exhibited different ranges in attitudes than others, according to the study. The 140-word message also shows how attitudes change seasonally. The research shows the weather also affects how we feel. When the sun shines more in the spring and starts to disappear in the fall, our moods are affected accordingly.
Using Twitter, they collected 400 messages from each user they followed. Unlike other studies, the researchers said by getting the messages in real-time, the users were not prompted by an experimenter and less vulnerable to memory bias.
