Election Day '08, happiest day in 4 years

BURLINGTON, Vt., July 27 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers monitoring blogs found Election Day 2008 was the happiest day in four years and the day Michael Jackson died was one of the unhappiest.

Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist working in the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, said a Web site can mine through some 2.3 million blogs, looking for sentences beginning with "I feel" or "I am feeling."

"We gathered nearly 10 million sentences from their site," Dodds said in a statement. "Then, drawing on a standardized 'psychological valence' of words, each sentence receives a happiness score."

In the study, a large pool of participants graded their reaction to 1,034 words, forming a kind of "happy-unhappy" scale from 1 to 9. For example, "triumphant" averaged 8.87, "paradise" 8.72, "pancakes" 6.08, "vanity" 4.30, "hostage" 2.20, and "suicide" 1.25.

"Any one sentence might not show much. There's too much variability in individual expression," Dodds said in a statement. "Our method is only reasonable for large-scale texts, like what's available on the Web."

Although bloggers tend to be somewhat younger and more educated than average, they are broadly representative of the U.S. population, Dodds said.

Election Day 2008 showed a spike in the word "proud."

"That was the biggest deviation in the last four years," Danforth said. "To have 'proud' be the word that moves the needle is remarkable."

The finding is published in the Journal of Happiness Studies.