Stay Curious

SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER AND UNLOCK ONE MORE ARTICLE FOR FREE.

Sign Up

VIEW OUR Privacy Policy


Discover Magazine Logo

WANT MORE? KEEP READING FOR AS LOW AS $1.99!

Subscribe

ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER?

FIND MY SUBSCRIPTION
Advertisement

Pop Music & Blogs as Indicators of Gross National Happiness

Explore how scientists are quantifying the happiness of society through song lyrics and emotional blog content.

Newsletter

Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news

Sign Up

Evaluating the happiness of an entire society is tricky--after all, the traditional survey-based method of collecting data doesn't work for such a huge population. But now scientists say they have come up with a way to quantify the well-being of a society: by analyzing song lyrics and blog posts for emotionally charged words, according to a study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Among their findings, researchers determined that bloggers in their 50s and 60s are most content, and that popular music has become increasingly less happy since the 1960s. To evaluate the overall happiness of the public, researchers pulled data from nearly two-and-a-half million blogs and 230,000 song lyrics. With the aid of their own computers, the researchers scanned the texts for more than 1000 emotionally charged words that a 1999 psychology study had ranked on a scale from 1 (miserable) to 9 (ecstatic). "Triumphant" and "love" topped ...

Stay Curious

JoinOur List

Sign up for our weekly science updates

View our Privacy Policy

SubscribeTo The Magazine

Save up to 40% off the cover price when you subscribe to Discover magazine.

Subscribe
Advertisement

0 Free Articles