We attribute our changing moods to many things -- bad news or good news, ugly weather or beautiful sunshine, hormones and pheromones, and so on. While all these factors may, in fact, have something to do with the mystery of mood changes, a new study tells us that moods also may fluctuate according to some universal schedule that governs people all over the globe, regardless of location or events.1
The study, conducted by sociologists Michael Macy and Scott Golder of Cornell University, analyzed over half a billion messages posted on Twitter by 2.4 million English-speaking individuals in 84 countries. There is much to be astonished at in that fact alone -- the sheer volume of data, for one thing, and also the fact that all that data (your Tweets and probably Facebook posts) can be accessed by researchers, and even the fact that social media sites now are being looked at as repositories of good information about global trends.
If you've been on a safari to the Moon for the last few years and don't know what Twitter is, it's an online community where people can post up to 140 characters at a time (mostly from their cell phones) letting the world know what they're up to. For perspective, the previous sentence contains 246 characters, meaning that "Tweets" (the name assigned to Twitter posts) are pretty puny in length. Although the overwhelming number of Tweets are insane, Tweeting played a major role in coordinating the several revolutions of the Arab Spring;2 and again, as pointed out above, this mountain of banality can now be mined for gems of scientific research.
To do this, the scientists fed the messages into a computer program and searched for about 1000 words that had either negative or positive connotations. They then evaluated the messages by hour of the day, looking for those value-laden keywords. According to the system, words like "awesome" and "fantastic" denote a happy mood, while words like "annoyed" and "afraid" indicate a down mood.3 Upon analysis, the results showed a clear pattern: people everywhere in the world used their happiest language and ostensibly were in their brightest mood first thing in the morning, typically between 6:00 and 9:00 am. Then, there was a slow decline, with people getting in progressively worse moods until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. Moods started climbing up the happiness scale again after that, peaking a bit after dinner. The analysis found that people were in their worst moods on Monday, with moods getting sunnier by the day until peaking on the weekend. >
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