America, are you happy? The emotional words contained in hundreds of millions of messages posted to the Twitter website may hold the answer.
Computer scientist Alan Mislove at Northeastern University in Boston and colleagues have found that these “tweets” suggest that the west coast is happier than the east coast, and across the country happiness peaks each Sunday morning, with a trough on Thursday evenings. The team calls their work the “pulse of the nation”. link to read article Source:New Scientist hat tip 😉 @NewScientist
There may be a literal truth underlying the common-sense intuition that happiness and sadness are contagious.
A new study on the spread of emotions through social networks shows that these feelings circulate in patterns analogous to what’s seen from epidemiological models of disease.
Earlier studies raised the possibility, but had not mapped social networks against actual disease models.
“This is the first time this contagion has been measured in the way we think about traditional infectious disease,” said biophysicist Alison Hill of Harvard University.
New technologies and social media are training up the next generation of superbrains, but are young people emotionally all there? John Naish is paying close attention. Link to read his article Here come the supertaskers in The New Statesman
Supertaskers constitute only 2.5 per cent of the population, Watson believes. But even that level is surprisingly high. “According to cognitive theory, these individuals ought not to exist,” he says in a paper soon to be published by the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. Further research into supertaskers may reveal how the multitasking regions of their brains are different, due to some inherited variation. Watson predicts that employers in high-performance professions will want to screen for genetic markers of supertasking ability. Generation Whatever’s multi-mediated brains may be the key to our ever-faster future.
People who are usually happy, enthusiastic and content are less likely to develop heart disease than those who tend not to be happy, according to a study published in Europe’s leading cardiology journal, the European Heart Journal [1]. The authors believe that the study is the first to show such an independent relationship between positive emotions and coronary heart disease. [continue reading…]
