Twitter confirms people are happiest in the morning and on weekends: scientists

If you think Twitter is only good for furthering Charlie Sheen's career and sharing what you ate for breakfast, you might be surprised to learn what scientists do with it.

By analyzing over 500 million tweets, scientists have concluded that people generally wake up in a good mood and hit their peak happiness on weekends. This might not sound like an earth-shattering revelation, but it shows one of the innovative ways for researchers to capitalize on the vast amount of public information available on Twitter.

According to The Canadian Press, researchers at Cornell University looked at English-language tweets from 2.4 million users, searching for key mood words, then plotting what time those tweets occurred. They found that with the exception of "night owls," most people tended to wake up in a good mood, have that dip by midday, but go up in the evening with a peak around midnight.

The Cornell researchers say that this is in line with sleep patterns and circadian rhythms. On weekends, the mood swings of Twitter users followed the same pattern, except they were about two hours behind the weekday. This was likely on account of people sleeping in, researchers say.

The two-year study found this pattern was true worldwide. In the United Arab Emirates, the workday-weekend fluctuation was the same, even though the weekend in the United Arab Emirates falls on Friday and Saturday and the workday begins earlier.

Check out The Washington Post graphic based on the data. It shows which days get the most positive tweets and which ones aren't as cheery (spoiler: Mondays aren't all that popular).

The researchers were particularly excited about Twitter providing a whole new way to study people without the constraints of a laboratory environment. It allows people to act natural. However, monitoring people through Twitter provides some challenges too.

"Unlike laboratory studies, we have little data on conditions that are known to influence mood, including demographic and occupational backgrounds that may influence when and how much people sleep, the level and timing of environmental stress, susceptibility to affective contagion, and access to social support," study co-conductor Scott Golder told the CBC.

(Reuters Photo)