Happiness Formulas - Subjective well-being: Institute of subjective ...

Chapter 5 – Facebook Collective
happiness
Happiness = (positive words) – (non-positive words)
5.1 How to calculate it?
Facebook itself calculates the index, by automatically and anonymously
analyzing the number of positive and negative words in status updates for
selected Countries. Of course, this means that, even when facebookers are
just passing along a story, the words contained in a breaking-news can
influence the index. For example, the Australia's index was lowest on Feb.
13, 2008, the day Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized in Parliament to
indigenous Australians, reflecting the 4 percent of Aussie status updates
containing the word "sorry."
Data is aggregated in graphs, containing several metrics. GNH, represents
Facebook measure of Gross National Happiness. Positivity and Negativity
represent the two components of GNH: the extent to which words used on
that day were positive and negative. Gross National Happiness is the
difference between the positivity and negativity scores, though they are
interesting to view on their own. The same model is applied separately to
each country analyzed. Each model is thus calibrated differently, which
eliminates effects due to differences in the countries' population and
language use. .
5.2 What does it mean?
These are some findings, as published on March 2010 by Facebook
Data Team:
* Christmas, New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day are still among the
happiest days for all of these nations, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday are
happiest days of the week.
* Canadians are happier the day before Canadian Thanksgiving (a
Sunday) than on the actual Canadian Thanksgiving Day (a Monday).
* Happiness levels in the UK seem to have the least variation, with the
fewest large peaks among all the graphs due to holidays.
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