What’s on your mind? Social psychologists at Facebook have developed a program to figure that out — and they’re using what’s on your mind to measure the overall mood of the nation.
One of scientists behind the Facebook happiness-measuring index is University graduate teaching fellow, Adam Kramer.
Kramer’s index looks at each update of a registered English-speaking user, after removing all personal identification, and counts how many words are positive and negative. With this data, the index represents a given day’s worth of positive and negative words on a scaled graph.
The index uses a word-counting and analysis device called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. The application uses an internal dictionary to determine what category to place each word in someone’s status, then takes the word count with the categorized words and analyzes the status to determine “happiness.”
The index dictionary consists of 406 positive words, such as “happy,” “yay” and “awesome,” and 506 negative words such as “sad,” “doubt” and “tragic.” And while there are more negative words than positive, Kramer says that does not mean people are less happy.
“We could have a language with a million ‘happy’ words,” Kramer said. “It makes a difference in how many words are used in that language.”
Apparently, people use more happy words than sad. Kramer found that people are 9.7 percent less happy on Mondays than on Fridays, and national holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July have some of the highest spikes on the scale.
The lowest day recorded on the scale in the past two years was January 22, 2008, the day the Asian stock market crashed and (coincidentally) the date actor Heath Ledger died. The death of cultural icon Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009, was the second lowest day on record.
“I mean, this is America, we have it pretty good,” Kramer said. “It takes something pretty big to make such an impact on the nation as a whole.”
The Massachusetts-native completed his undergraduate work at Carnegie Mellon University in logic and computation, and currently works at the University of Oregon teaching applied data analysis.
Kramer said he spent two summers interning for Google in 2006 and 2007, and began working for Facebook in 2008.
Day-to-day, Kramer analyzes the massive amounts of data that Facebook accumulates. It’s one of his jobs to make the site faster and easier to use, but that doesn’t stop user grievances ending up in his inbox everyday.
“There are a lot of people on Facebook,” Kramer said. “It’s something that you can’t really escape.”
Kramer said one of the perks of working for the social networking site was moving to Palo Alto and being around really friendly and smart people.
“That and the fact that they feed us,” Kramer said. “I worked for Google for two years and Facebook pushed the chefs from them — the good ones.”
But working for Facebook is more than browsing profiles all day — to Kramer, it is real work that he takes seriously.
“I am very interested in the question of word use,” Kramer said. “Words that we use to write and speak with reflect our physiological traits. That is what brought me to the idea of the Index.”
Cataloging emotions is not a novel idea. In 2005, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar created the site “We Feel Fine.” Like Kramer’s index, the We Feel Fine program scours the Internet every few minutes, “collecting human feelings from a large number of blogs.”
“At that point, the Web was not seen as a very emotional space, and we wanted to show what a personal, human place it was,” Kamvar said.
The creators of the site both previously worked on the web, and as more people started using blogs and social networks, they realized that blogs gave an insight into human nature. The two took the large amount of data and created an online art piece to do large-scale statistics on human emotion.
“People like to get insights about themselves,” Kamvar said. “Since emotions are so universal, looking at the emotions of others is a way to learn more about yourself.”
Kamvar’s site displays the ongoing blog postings of Web users, and finds, like Kramer’s index, the information is useful and interesting to anyone who cares about the mood of the nation. It somewhat determines how much we as a country are worth, Kramer said.
Kramer plans to finish his dissertation and apply for a teaching position in the coming year, but what can we expect next from him and the data team?
“I’m working at Facebook on fantastically interesting things that I can’t talk about,” Kramer says. “But my mom is sure proud.”
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Your happiness, measured
Daily Emerald
October 20, 2009
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