Your tweets reflect how happy you are
Be careful with what you tweet, as a new research suggests that it may reveal a lot more than you intend to, for instance, how happy you are with life.
In a new study, researchers have revealed that your tweets can tell whether you are happy or not. According to scientists, who used Twitter data to measure users’ life satisfaction, your tweets are a reflection of how happy you are.
A team of computer analysts including an Indian-origin has developed an algorithm that can accurately predict the level of satisfaction and happiness by just accessing the twitter account of an individual.
Scientists from the Unversity of Iowa have developed an algorithm that uses word count of a tweet to measure the life satisfaction level and study authors believe that a tweet can reflect person’s state of mind.
This study is different from most social media research on happiness because it looks at how users feel about their lives over time, instead of how they feel in the moment, said Chao Yang, a graduate at the University of Iowa (UI) in US.
Yang, along with Padmini Srinivasan, a professor at UI, mined data from about 3 billion tweets from October 2012 to October 2014. Study authors selected only those tweets that consisted words like “I”, “me” and “mine” in order to get a better self-reflection of person’s state of mind.
Researchers developed algorithms to capture the basic ways of expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one’s life. They found that people’s feelings of long-term happiness and satisfaction with their lives remained steady over time, unaffected by external events such as an election, a sports game, or an earthquake in another country.
On the contrary, previous studies that took short-term happiness into account had found that external events affect people’s daily moods heavily.
Yang and Srinivasan found satisfied users were active on Twitter for a longer period of time and used more hashtags and exclamation marks but included fewer URLs in their tweets.
In the study, it was found that unhappy people frequently used personal pronouns, conjunctions and profanity in their tweets. Dissatisfied people are 10 percent more likely to use negative expression in their tweets and use words like “should,” “would,” “expect,” “hope,” and “need” that may express determination and aspirations for the future.
While satisfied and happy people frequently use more than 140 characters in their tweets and are likely to use positive words and talk on positive topics like health, sexuality, money and religion.
According to Srinivasan, research like this is significant because life satisfaction is a big component of happiness.
“With this research, we can get a better understanding of the differences between those who express satisfaction and those who express dissatisfaction with their life,” she noted in a study published in the journal PLOS One.
|