Measuring Happiness, Health, and Social Stories

Please note this is a WEBINAR

In this talk, I will report on a wide array of findings obtained through our real-time, remote-sensing, non-invasive, text-based `hedonometer'---an instrument for measuring positivity in written expression, now housed online at hedonometer.org. I will show how we have improved our methods to allow us to robustly explore collective, dynamical patterns of happiness and other emotions found in massive text corpora including the global social network Twitter, song lyrics, blogs, political speeches, and news sources.  From the viewpoint of Twitter, I will report on global levels of temporal, spatial (cities and states), demographic, and social variations in happiness and information levels, as well as evidence of emotional synchrony and contagion, and how happiness changes with movement patterns.  Where possible, I will demonstrate that our real-time measure agrees well with various other metrics. I will also discuss how word usage in tweets connects with other features such as food consumption and state-level obesity rates, and can be used to uncover stories in social media. Finally, I will present evidence for how 10 diverse natural languages appear to contain a striking frequency-independent positive bias, describing how this phenomenon plays a key role in our instrument's performance, and how it more deeply reflects human nature.

 

Event Details

Date/Time:

  • Date: 
    Wednesday, February 5, 2014 - 10:00am

Location:
Howey N110