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Mood Scores: Which Day Of The Week Has The Lowest Rating?


You know that 1979 Boomtown Rats song, “I Don’t Like Mondays.” (This Youtube music video features a very young-looking Bob Geldof.)  The song is about the 1979 shooting spree on a Monday morning at a San Diego elementary school. The shooter’s only state reason for doing it was that she didn’t like Mondays.

The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody’s gonna go to school today
She’s gonna make them stay at home

It turns out that — contrary to popular impression that Mondays are the worst day of the week — Tuesdays are the worst day of the week.  According to a piece by Chris Hall (@hallicious) on HealthCentral, Tuesdays are the worst day of the week (moodwise) while Sundays are the best. This is based on mood rating scores from 500 users of the Mood 24/7 service, which HealthCentral licenses from Johns Hopkins University. After you sign up for the free service, the software sends you a text message at random times, and you text back your mood rating for that day.

So, you’d think that the latest date of the coming apocalypse, October 21, might be on a Tuesday. But it’s not — it’s on a Friday.  Maybe it will get moved again.—–

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Twitter Used To Gauge The Nation’s Mood

A team from Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School has been analyzing words used in tweets by American users in an attempt to gauge the public mood around the country.

What they discovered was that users on the West Coast seem to be quite a bit jollier than those on the East Coast. It’s not clear whether the data was collected during the summer or winter months and accordingly adjusted, for that surely would affect the readings.

Researchers were able to infer the mood of each tweet using a psychological word-rating system developed by the National Institute of Mental Health’s Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention. The system ranks words based on how they make people feel. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

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