Researchers have analysed the content of 10,000 mood-annotated blogposts in order to establish what times people are most likely to indicate a happy or sad mood and what words within posts are most likely to be associated with these moods. Unsurprisingly happiness peaks on Saturday night and Wednesday is shown to definitely be "hump day". The best ingredients for maximum happiness are: something new, lots of food you enjoy, your favorite drink, preferably in an interesting social place. The happiest word is "yay" followed closely by "shopping"!
A corpus-based approach to finding happiness
3 comments:
i haven't read any of the literature but i cant even imagine the kind of stuff people must be doing with Google search data if its available for researchers. Google must know some pretty interesting things about the world at this stage.
Eh...what exactly is a "hump day"?
It's like casual Friday only with a twist.. not really, it's the middle of a work week, as in reaching the peak of a proverbial hill when getting through the pain of the working week!
I would love to know how to programme the crawling software for pulling this info off the web. I got Perl for Dummies from the library once but think I needed a dumberer version. Some great work out there though especially on social networks and predicting the interests of people based on their friends or the products they are likely to like based on personal characteristics and current tastes. Research in this area could earn you a fortune with the right skills and application.
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