Measuring happiness in large population

Abstract

The ability to know emotional states for large number of people is important, for example, to ensure the effectiveness of public policies. In this study, we propose a measure of happiness that can be used in large scale population that is based on the analysis of Indonesian language lexicons. Here, we incorporate human assessment of Indonesian words, then quantify happiness on large-scale of texts gathered from twitter conversations. We used two psychological constructs to measure happiness: valence and arousal. We found that Indonesian words have tendency towards positive emotions. We also identified several happiness patterns during days of the week, hours of the day, and selected conversation topics.