Health & Science

Measuring a nation’s mood; New respect for the spleen; How humans first got malaria; Success beats failure

Measuring a nation’s mood

The national mood is a nebulous thing. How best to gauge it? Directly polling large populations with questions about feelings—“Are you feeling happy today?”—tends to prompt respondents to skew their answers positively. But two University of Vermont statisticians have found a unique, Internet-based approach to measuring the rise and fall of the public’s sense of well-being. First they downloaded 230,000 song lyrics from Hotlyrics.net, to get a sense of what types of songs—melancholy, upbeat, angry—were popular at any given time. Then they sifted through hundreds of millions of sentences from Wefeelfine.org, which scans 2.4 million blogs for the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling.” Next they searched the texts for key words rated 1 to 9 on a happiness scale. (“Triumphant” and “love” garner an 8.7; “hostage” rates 2.2.) From these figures, the scientists calculated the average societal happiness each day, going back decades. Among the results: Vacations and holidays are consistently happy days. Two particularly bright days were President Obama’s election and inauguration, while Sept. 11, 2001, and its anniversaries caused a profound drop in the national mood, with 2003 marking a low point. “We argue that you can use this data as a kind of remote sensor of well-being,” co-author Peter Dodds tells The New York Times. This new form of analysis—which will focus on tweets next—“is really exciting,” says psychologist James Pennebaker, who was not involved in the study. “It’s going to change the social sciences. That is very clear.’’

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us