Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter

Individual happiness is a fundamental societal metric. Normally measured through self-report, happiness has often been indirectly characterized and overshadowed by more readily quantifiable economic indicators such as gross domestic product. Here, we examine expressions made on the online, global microblog and social networking service Twitter, uncovering and explaining temporal variations in happiness and information levels over timescales ranging from hours to years. Our data set comprises over 46 billion words contained in nearly 4.6 billion expressions posted over a 33 month span by over 63 million unique users. In measuring happiness, we construct a tunable, real-time, remote-sensing, and non-invasive,…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: CAREER, 0846668
• NA
  National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• OO
  Office of Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research