Researchers at the University of Iowa (UI) claim that they can find out if people are happy through their Twitter posts. They will be gathering data from Twitter posts in a span of two years, to gauge the happiness level of the users. They reportedly digged into 3 billion tweets made from October 2012 to October 2014 to arrive at this conclusion.
The researchers have created an algorithm that would acquire the basic form of expressing life satisfaction. The tweets will be translated to create a retrieval template, looking for similar expressions from other Twitter users. Analyzing tweets over a period, they will analyze the happiness levels.
They say people with good life satisfaction tend to use positive words in their tweets where as dissatisfied people are more likely to express emotion using words associated with anxiety, anger, depression and death. The study’s findings were published on March 16 in the journal PLOS ONE.
