Wednesday, Most Miserable Day of the Week, According to Tweet & Blog Analysis

Discarding the long-standing assumption about Monday being the most miserable day of the week, a recent research has shown that most of us like the first day back at office after the weekend, as the day has been rated as the second happiest day of the week. 

Peter Dodd and Christopher Danforth, a researcher duo from the advanced computing centre in the Vermont University, claimed to have devised an innovative system that can gauge collective happiness, simply by analysing people’s feelings by evaluating their tweets and blogs. 

With the help of their newly devised system, the researchers analysed words used in as many as 2.4 million blogs and tweets across the web and concluded that most of us usually feel at our worst on Wednesdays - not on Mondays.   

They further assigned scores to various words on the scale of one to nine depending on their emotional content. Words like ‘rainbow’, ‘free’, ‘fun’, all scored more than eight, while words showing negative feelings, such as ‘cruel’, ‘suffocate’, ‘hatred’, ‘betray’, all obtained less than two. 

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Touting the significance of the new way of measuring happiness, Dr Danforth said, “We were able to make observations of people in a fairly natural environment at a magnitude higher than previous happiness studies. They think they are communicating with friends, but since blogs are public we're just looking over their shoulders.” 

Our Comments

Got that Wednesday feeling? Well, it looks as if the third day of the week is the new Monday. All things considered, it does make sense that Wednesday is the one where spirits are low. It is also quite interesting to see how the researchers have managed to explored so many tweets and blogs simply using keywords and tags.

Related Links
Wednesday is the most miserable day of the week, claim researchers
(Telegraph)

Yes, we love Mondays - our tweets say so
(The New Zealand Herald)

Tweeters and bloggers show we do like Mondays after all
(Guardian)

Week's worst day? It's Wednesday, not Monday
(The Times Of India)