University of Vermont: Twitter word survey shows we are not as happy as before

On December 21, 2011, scientists from the University of Vermont in the United States analyzed the words used on the social networking site Twitter and ultimately concluded that "people are not as happy as before."

The research results were published in the internationally renowned academic journal PLoS ONE on December 7. The study said that since April 2009, people's overall sense of happiness has been on a downward trend.

Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study, told Psych Central, a US mental health website, that the results showed people's happiness was declining.

Dodds and his team came to the conclusion after analyzing 46 billion words posted by 63 million Twitter users.

The study was conducted through Mechanical Turk, a service website owned by Amazon. The specific operation is as follows: Each word sent by Twitter users will be ranked according to the degree of emotion, with 9 points meaning the happiest. For example, the word "laugh" can get 8.5 points, and the word "terrorist" can get 1.3 points. However, Psych Central said that scoring words in this way would be biased, articles and food names would not make much sense, while nouns such as "suicide" and "greed" would score lower.

The researchers found that usage of the word "happiness," at least on Twitter, has been declining over the past three years. They also found that Twitter users are happiest on weekends and least happy at the beginning of the week.