A couple of researchers have come up with a new way to measure our collective happiness—by analyzing the millions of blog entries that include the words “I feel” or “I am feeling.” This is apparently a better method than the questionnaires normally used by researchers since people tend to misremember or falsely report their feelings when asked about them by a scientist.
To analyze the blogs, computer scientist Chris Danforth and mathematician Peter Dodds of the University of Vermont scored the “happiness level” of nearly 10 million sentences posted over the last four years (collected via the Web site We Feel Fine). To come up with the score, they gave a numerical value to each key words and then averaged them out. (The values were based on an earlier study in which people ranked words on a “happy-unhappy” scale.)
Here’s how the method works, using the lyrics from Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”:

Using this system to analyze blog posts, they determined that the day Jackson died was one of the unhappiest in the last four years. The happiest? November 4, 2008— election day—when the researchers recorded a huge spike in the word “proud.”
As Danforth notes:

That was the biggest deviation in the last four years. To have ‘proud’ be the word that moves the needle is remarkable.