Twitter users' happiness declines

Scientists of University of Vermont have conducted a study and mentioned that the Twitter users might be less happy than they were. They have spent three years in analyzing over billions of tweets made by the users and found the happiness to slide down the scale. It is quite unusual for the researchers to make use of Twitter in order sense the mood of the users but still another study has been carried out on this.

In the latest one, the scientists have studied the word content in over 4 billion tweets that were posted by about 63 million users from across the world. The tweets were sent from September 2008 to September 2011. The volunteers have read the tweets and then they have rated the happiness quality in them starting from nine to one with nine being the happiest and one the saddest.

The scientists have made use of the sad to happy word rating scale along with some mathematical formulas to the judge the tweets. They have found happiness to drop down from April 2009 after the upward ranking from January to April 2009. But it again accelerated to some extent in the first two quarters of this year.

The scientists claim that the happiness was found to drop when the US financial system faced a drop in 2008 and when the pandemic flu HINI hit the world in 2009. The day Michael Jackson passed away experienced the largest single day happiness drop. The slowest happiness day was when Osama Bin Laden died in 2011.

The scientists also analyzed that Saturday was the most happiest day in the week and Tuesday was the least happiest day. The most happiest hour of the day was from 5 to 6 am and when there were more positive and less negative tweets. After this time, the happiness dropped slowly and was the least from 10 to 11 pm.