Mining Data for National Happiness

If using popular song lyrics as an index, we sounded pretty happy in the mid-1960s. Things got increasingly dark after that. If we use blogs as a measure, well-being is rising steadily, and has been since 2005. Other indicators of national happiness are State of the Union addresses, Facebook and Twitter.

Determining happiness and well-being is a growing field in mass psychology. In Europe, especially Denmark, governments have been researching such trends for years. Bhutan has made "gross national happiness" an official measure.

A team of statisticians at the University of Vermont propose that analyzing popular language could be a valuable tool in the growing field of determining national well-being. Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds recently wrote a paper on what they are calling a "hedonometer", a real time measure of happiness around the globe. Chris Danforth, an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at UVM, joins us to tell us what that means.

Times Online: Twittering your way to happiness

(Photo by YoGeek Mami via Flickr/Creative Commons)