The Boomtown Rats were wrong — we do like Mondays. The first day back at work after the weekend was always assumed to be the day we are most miserable, but in fact it is the second happiest day of the week and we feel at our worst on Wednesdays, researchers claim.
Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth, applied mathematicians at the advanced computing centre in the University of Vermont, believe they have finally devised a system of measuring collective happiness — something that has frustrated social scientists for decades — by studying people’s feelings by analysing blogs and tweets.
“We were able to make observations of people in a fairly natural environment at a magnitude higher than previous happiness studies,” Danforth said. “They think they are communicating with friends, but since blogs are public we’re just looking over their shoulders.”
The pair studied 2,4-million blogs written during the past four years and awarded each a score on a scale of one to nine based on words used that bear meaningful emotional content. So “triumphant”, “paradise” and “love” all scored very high, whereas “trauma”, “funeral” and “suicide” were at the opposite end of the scale. Abstract words such as “pancakes” and “street” scored above average.
Danforth said people blogged on Sunday what they did on Saturday night and their sentiments on Monday might still reflect good memories of the weekend. By the middle of the week, people were at their lowest point.
More than 10-million sentences were trawled through looking for those beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling” and the results, which appear in the Journal of Happiness Studies, showed that Barack Obama’s election on 4 November 2008 was the happiest day in four years, with a sharp increase in the word “proud”. Michael Jackson’s death last month was one of the unhappiest.
The happiest people were those aged between 45 and 60 while parents will not be shocked to read that teenagers are the grumpiest. More than 230 000 songs by 20 025 artists were also studied, with some findings not altogether surprising either. The Beach Boys, Buddy Holly and S Club 7 all scored more than seven on the happiness scale, leaving US thrash metal merchants Slayer, Slipknot and Norwegian black metal outfit Darkthrone propping up the table.
Dodds said his study ignored context completely, so songs such as Ryan Adams’s Love is Hell would get a middle-of-the-road score of 5,5, averaging 8,7 (love) and 2,2 (hell). “What we’re attempting to do is measure collective happiness on a much larger scale, similar to measuring the temperature outside. The energy of a few molecules bouncing around doesn’t give a good indication of heat, you need billions or more. I’d be more comfortable with the measure we come up with for the entire body of Adams’s work, or all of pop music (6,7).”
Finally, Dodds and Danforth investigated each State of the Union address made by the 43 US presidents up to Obama. Kennedy gave the happiest speech, followed by Eisenhower, which the authors say ended the gloomier speeches made after the first world war onwards. Reagan tied with Eisenhower in second place, with his successors each giving a more negative address than the last. – guardian.co.uk