BRISTOL, England, April 16 (UPI) -- Researchers say they've been able to identify the mood of the British public by analyzing the postings of Twitter users during periods of social change.
Scientists at the University of Bristol said they observed a significant increase in negative mood, anger and fear occurring with the announcement of spending cuts and during summer riots last year.
On the flip side, they said, there was a possibly calming effect occurring during the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, a university release said Monday.
A collection of 484 million tweets generated by more than 9.8 million users were analyzed between July 2009 and January 2012, a period marked by economic downturn and some social tensions in Britain.
The aim of the study was to see if the effects of social events could be seen in the contents of Twitter, researchers said, by looking at the frequency of words that are correlated with the sentiments of joy, fear, anger and sadness.
"Social media allows for the easy gathering of large amounts of data generated by the public while communicating with each other," Nello Cristianini, a Bristol professor of artificial intelligence, said.
"While we leave the interpretation of our findings to social and political scientists," Cristianini said, "we observed how the period preceding the royal wedding seems to be marked by a lowered incidence of anger and fear, which starts rising soon after that."
