Americans are depressed, according to their tweets

Feeling glum? That’s no surprise to researchers at the University of Virginia who found that our collective happiness is declining—based on the tweets we send.

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The study, not so succinctly dubbed “Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter,” examined 4.6 billion tweets over a 33-month span and assigned happiness levels to various keywords.

From the VT Digger:

“Reporting in the Dec. 7 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, the team writes, ‘After a gradual upward trend that ran from January to April, 2009, the overall time series has shown a gradual downward trend, accelerating somewhat over the first half of 2011.’

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