Levels of contentment encapsulated in Tweets are influenced by how far away from home you are, say computer scientists who have been keeping eyes on people's attitudes on Twitter.
Tweets can say a lot about how a person feels: in fact, many are quite public with sentiments online, revealing private details and beliefs to the web. As a modern society, we tend to express ourselves on social media platforms everyday.
Knowing this, Morgan Frank and a group of his constituents at the University of Vermont have begun analyzing how movement and travel affects sentiments expressed on Twitter.
The findings were that, "expressed happiness increases logarithmically with distance from an individual's average location," Mashable reports.
This means that people Tweet more upbeat content when farther away from any kind of homebase, which includes work or an abode.
Apparently, these two locations are where people Tweet from the most.
After looking at 37 million tweets written by 180,000 people in 2011 that came with a location, the team distinguished how each individual traveled, and the ways that potentially changed the manner in which they Tweeted.
Using a series of key words used to describe satisfaction and bliss, the researchers measured level of happiness given location.
They found that when people were far away from home or work, they were more likely to use words like, "beach," "great," "vacation" or "restaurant," usually connoting a good time. They were less likely to employ words with shades of negativity, like "no," "don't," or "hate."
The biggest difference, Morgan claims, in happiness levels is the impressive reduced rate of negative words used further away from home.
He was quick to point out, though, that expressed levels of happiness are not exactly the same thing as literal happiness. Some Tweeters may be expressing their positivity in jest, or maybe they aren't experiencing actual happiness.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
