Did you know that this guy :) is happier than this guy :-) ?

What about that fact that Mon and Tues are generally our saddest days of the week?

smiley face

How is happiness measured?

Usually, factors such as a county’s GDP, poverty levels and unemployment rate determine the response But, with more of the globe jumping on the social media train, in particular on Twitter, social networks play a larger role in determining our moods, how we get our information and our general day-to-days.

So, how the heck do you use Twitter to measure the mood of the world?

I’m glad you asked! A group of researchers from the University of Vermont set out to answer that exact question…using math. Yes, that’s right, math + Twitter keywords = r u happy?

The team applies complex algorithms to a data set that includes over 46 billion words pulled from close to 4.6 billion tweets sent over 33 months by more than 63 million unique users.

How complex is the algorithm, you say?

So, what do our social media interactions—specifically, our tweets—say about our level of happiness?

The experiment pulled in some interesting results, like global mood patterns and trends. The cross-culture patterns go something like this:

happy Twitter graph

As you might expect, tweeters are happiest on Friday and Saturday, but their mood declines sharply as Monday morning rolls around and everyone’s back to the grind.

Regarding personal pronouns

“Generally, tweets containing personal pronouns tell a positive pro-social story with ‘our’ and ‘you’ outranking ‘I’ and ‘me’ in happiness. The least happy pronoun on our list is the easily demonized ‘they’,” says onehappybird.com.