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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 10: Focus Session: Experimental Methods

SOE 10.4: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 15:00–15:30, GÖR 226

Measuring Happiness — •Peter S. Dodds — University of Vermont, Burlington, USA

Individual happiness is a fundamental reflection of societal health. Normally measured through self-report, happiness has often been indirectly characterized and overshadowed by more readily quantifiable economic indicators, such as gross domestic product. In this talk, I will provide motivation for measuring well-being online through non-invasive observation, as a complement to traditional survey methods, and I will outline recent `big data' efforts that have extracted emotional content from written expression. I will report in particular on a real-time, remote-sensing, non-invasive, text-based approach---a kind of hedonometer---which we have used to uncover collective dynamical patterns of happiness as expressed in the global social network Twitter, song lyrics, blogs, political speeches, and news sources. I will report on global levels of temporal, spatial, demographic, and social variations in happiness and information levels, as well as evidence of emotional synchrony and contagion. I will employ a particular graphical method to show how individual words contribute to changes in average happiness between any two texts. Finally, I will also discuss how natural language appears to contain a frequency-independent positive bias, and how this connects to collective cooperation and evolution.