A hedonometer or hedonimeter is a device used to gauge

happiness Happiness is a complex and multifaceted emotion that encompasses a range of positive feelings, from contentment to intense joy. It is often associated with positive life experiences, such as achieving goals, spending time with loved ones, ...

pleasure Pleasure is experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something. It contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad. It is closely related to value, desire and action: humans and other conscious animals find ...

. Conceived of at least as early as 1880, the term was used in 1881 by the economist

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (8 February 1845 – 13 February 1926) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward, he was appointed th ...

to describe "an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine, continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual." More recently, it has been used to refer to a tool developed by Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth to gauge the valence of various corpora, including historical

State of the Union The State of the Union Address (sometimes abbreviated to SOTU) is an annual message delivered by the president of the United States to a Joint session of the United States Congress, joint session of the United States Congress near the beginning ...

addresses, song lyrics, and online tweets and

blogs A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

. It is operated out of the

University of Vermont The University of Vermont and State Agricultural College, commonly referred to as the University of Vermont (UVM), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Burlington, Vermont, United States. Foun ...

(UVM), and has been in use since 2008. A version of the tool is available at hedonometer.org, which they call a sort of " Dow Jones Index of Happiness", and hope will be used by government officials in conjunction with other metrics as a gauge of the population's well-being. Computer scientists trained the hedonometer to recognize the emotion behind data as tweets with sentiment analysis techniques. Danforth preferred a lexicon approach, that measures the weight of a word, due to the energy required for neural nets. As of 2020, the hedonometer at UVM scrapes about 50 million tweets each day. Using

sentiment analysis Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subje ...

, the hedonometer takes the emotional temperature of the words published by users of various platforms.

External links

Hedonometer.org

* ttp://www.plosone.org/article/info%3adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0026752 Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter
Great Hedonometer, Story Grid Podcast, airing August 25, 2016

References

{{Reflist Happiness Measuring instruments

See also

External links

References