Washington: Are you feeling happy or sad? Well, scientists in the United States have created a ‘sensor’, which is capable of measuring happiness of people.
Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist respectively, working in the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, have developed a mechanism to measure happiness of millions of bloggers.
"The proliferation of personal online writing such as blogs gives us the opportunity to measure emotional levels in real time," they wrote in their study, `Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and residents,4" available in online edition of Journal of Happiness Studies.
Their "hedonimeter" gathers sentences beginning "I feel ..." Then, applying standardized "psychological valence" of words, each sentence receives a happiness score.
According to release by the University of Vermont, the scientists were able to make observations of people "in a fairly natural environment at several orders of magnitude higher than previous happiness studies".
"They think they are communicating with friends," but, since blogs are public, Danforth said, "we`re just looking over their shoulders." "We are thus able to present results of what might be considered a very basic remote-sensing hedonometer," Dodds and Danforth were quoted as saying in the release. "Our study is a data exploration," Danforth underlined, adding "It`s not about developing a theory."
In effect, the approach allows the scientists to measure happiness levels of: for example, people over 65 in Oregon on Wednesdays. Their method show that US presidential election day, November 4, 2008, was the happiest day in four years. The day of Micheal Jackson`s death, one of the unhappiest.
"We gathered nearly 10 million sentences from their site," Dodds noted. Then, drawing on a standardized "psychological valence" of words established by the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) study, each sentence receives a happiness score.
In the ANEW study, a large pool of participants graded their reaction to 1,034 words, forming a kind of "happy-unhappy" scale from 1 to 9. For example, "triumphant" averaged 8.87, "paradise" 8.72, "pancakes" 6.08, "vanity" 4.30, "hostage" 2.20, and "suicide" 1.25.
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