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From the Pages of Scientific American

Happy in the Morning

From the pages of Scientific American. Happy in the Morning. Twitter reveals daily emotional rhythms are consistent across cultures. “Happy hour” is not when you might expect it to be, according to a new analysis of about half a billion Twitter messages from around the globe. On average, people are chipper when they wake up and become grouchy as the day wears on. This pattern holds true on weekends, too, but is delayed by about two hours—a trend confirmed in tweets from the United Arab Emirates, where the workweek is Sunday through Thursday. The data suggest that sleep schedules strongly influence mood cycles. The duo at Cornell University who carried out the research, published last September in Science, say that the rising popularity of online social media is allowing scientists to study human behavior in surprising new ways. The author is Janelle Weaver. Reproduced with permission. Copyright 2012 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

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1.1 Quiz

1. In the study described, researchers conducted an analysis of the emotional valence of Twitter messages. What type of research is this?

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2. Someone might wonder if the causal mechanism behind changes in the emotional valence of people’s Tweets is an accumulated disgust from the horrible comments people can find online. How might the authors of the study respond to this contention?

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3. The findings of the study show that people’s mood states are:

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4. Some research by Deiner and by Mancini has contended that people simply get “used to” being happy; the experience of happiness quickly resets to a baseline. This concept is known as:

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5. The Twitter study collected data from around the world. The data from the United Arab Emirates, in part, led the researchers to conclude that __________ strongly influenced mood cycles.

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