research-article

Don't worry, be happy: the geography of happiness on Facebook

Author:

Daniele QuerciaAuthors Info & Claims

WebSci '13: Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference

Pages 316 - 325

https://doi.org/10.1145/2464464.2464484

Published: 02 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Social media sites have been used to track the expression of emotion words across nations. A question left unexplored is whether, at a similar scale, these sites can be used to collect reliable well-being data. To tackle this question, we collect Satisfaction With Life (SWL) test results from a Facebook application and show that aggregate country-level results significantly vary across twelve rich countries and strongly correlate with official well-being scores. To then show that collecting data on Facebook offers an informative look at the sociology of well-being, we study the impact of (un)happiness on the twelve countries by relating the test results on Facebook to reputable international indicators of social and health problems. We find that countries where happiness is lower have increased problems across the board: decreasing well-being is associated with increasing homicide, obesity, drug use, mental illness, and anxiety. In addition to offering these findings, this work hints at the conditions under which social media could be used for data-driven social science research.

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Cited By

Boumahdi IZaoujal N(2023)Regional subjective well‐being through a media sentiment index: Case of the Drâa‐Tafilalet oasis region in MoroccoRegional Science Policy & Practice10.1111/rsp3.12644Online publication date: 22-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1111/rsp3.12644
Huang YFei TKwan MKang YLi JLi YLi XBian M(2020)GIS-Based Emotional Computing: A Review of Quantitative Approaches to Measure the Emotion Layer of Human–Environment RelationshipsISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information10.3390/ijgi90905519:9(551)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi9090551
Kang YZeng XZhang ZWang YFei T(2018)Who are happier? Spatio-temporal Analysis of Worldwide Human Emotion Based on Geo-Crowdsourcing Faces2018 Ubiquitous Positioning, Indoor Navigation and Location-Based Services (UPINLBS)10.1109/UPINLBS.2018.8559710(1-8)Online publication date: Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/UPINLBS.2018.8559710
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Don't worry, be happy: the geography of happiness on Facebook
1. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WebSci '13: Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference

May 2013

481 pages

ISBN:9781450318891

DOI:10.1145/2464464

Conference Chairs:
Hugh Davis
University of Southampton
,
Harry Halpin
World Wide Web Consortium
,
Alex Pentland,
Program Chairs:
Mark Bernstein,
Lada Adamic,
Harith Alani,
Alexandre Monnin,
Richard Rogers

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 May 2013

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Seventh Framework Programme

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WebSci '13: Web Science 2013

May 2 - 4, 2013

Paris, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Boumahdi IZaoujal N(2023)Regional subjective well‐being through a media sentiment index: Case of the Drâa‐Tafilalet oasis region in MoroccoRegional Science Policy & Practice10.1111/rsp3.12644Online publication date: 22-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1111/rsp3.12644
Huang YFei TKwan MKang YLi JLi YLi XBian M(2020)GIS-Based Emotional Computing: A Review of Quantitative Approaches to Measure the Emotion Layer of Human–Environment RelationshipsISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information10.3390/ijgi90905519:9(551)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi9090551
Kang YZeng XZhang ZWang YFei T(2018)Who are happier? Spatio-temporal Analysis of Worldwide Human Emotion Based on Geo-Crowdsourcing Faces2018 Ubiquitous Positioning, Indoor Navigation and Location-Based Services (UPINLBS)10.1109/UPINLBS.2018.8559710(1-8)Online publication date: Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/UPINLBS.2018.8559710
Kayes IKourtellis NQuercia DIamnitchi ABonchi FYesilada YFarzan RHouben G(2015)Cultures in Community Question AnsweringProceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media10.1145/2700171.2791034(175-184)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2700171.2791034
Abdullah SMurnane ECosta JChoudhury TCosley DForte ACiolfi LMcDonald D(2015)Collective SmileProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2675133.2675186(361-374)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2675133.2675186
Saveski MQuercia DMantrach A(2014)The Geography of Online News EngagementSocial Informatics10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_20(279-289)Online publication date: 2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_20
Ferrara EVarol OMenczer FFlammini AMuthukrishnan MEl Abbadi AKrishnamurthy B(2013)Traveling trendsProceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks10.1145/2512938.2512956(213-222)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2512938.2512956

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