The analysis of tweets also revealed the times of day at which people are most emotional and analytical.
People are at their happiest point on Sunday mornings, an analysis of hundreds of millions of tweets has revealed.
Generally, though, people are at their most analytical in the morning and most emotional in the evenings, the research found.
The conclusion comes from the analysis of 7 billion words used in 800 million tweets across four years.
By tracking patterns of language use, fitting 73 psychometric indicators, the researchers were able to reveal how people’s thinking styles changed over the day.
They found that the strongest period for analytical thinking stretched from 6am to 10am, with the peak at 6am.
In this period, people were talking about achievement and attaining power, as well as things like money, home and work.
In the evening, though, people’s thinking style changed to more emotional and existential.
They talked about their relationships and sex.
In the early hours of the morning, they started to talk more about problems in life.
Happiness peaked on Sunday mornings, the study’s authors wrote:
“The population wake up in the best mood on Sunday with high positive emotions and low negative emotions, anger, and sadness, expressed after 6am.
In the couple of hours that follows, the working days are instead associated with relatively low mood characterized by low positive emotions and increased sadness.”
Some of the patterns could be down to the body’s natural Circadian rhythms, said Professor Stafford Lightman, study co-author:
“Circadian rhythms are a major feature of most systems in the human body, and when these are disrupted they can result in psychiatric, cardiovascular and metabolic disease.
The use of media data allows us to analyse neuropsychological parameters in a large unbiased population and gain insights into how mood-related use of language changes as a function of time of day.
This will help us understand the basis of disorders in which this process is disrupted.”
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The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE (Dzogang et al., 2018).
