People are happiest early in the morning and late at night.
That's the conclusion of a study of the popular social website Twitter, by Cornell University researchers.
Using “Linguistics Inquiry and Word Count” technology, researchers analyzed more than a half billion English language Twitter messages -- called tweets -- from 2.4 million people in 84 countries.
Their two-year study, recently published in Science magazine, measured “diverse cultures around the world in real time” by searching hourly for positive and negative words like “happy,” “enthusiastic,” “brilliant,” “sad”, “anxious,” and “fear.”
The results: people tend to be positive in the morning and late evening. The most positive tweeting occurred on weekends, but later in the morning -- based on the odds of people sleeping later. And shorter daylight days produce fewer positive tweets.
Cornell Sociology Professor Michael Macy, co-author of the study, told The Cornell Daily Sun newspaper that one of the most important implications of his research is the use of innovative methods to study human behavior.
“What Twitter and other social media make possible for the first time is the chance for social scientists to observe human behavior in real time with an enormously large scale,” Macy said.
Cornell graduate student and study co-author Scott A. Golder added: “Really what this study says to us is that more and more of the future of social science is going to be involving data from the Internet.”