Category: Emotion

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.”

Related

• Happiness Hacks: 20 Simple Strategies For A Brighter, Joy-Filled Life (P)
• The Happiness Paradox: 7 Ways Pursuing Pleasure Backfires (P)

The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE (Dzogang et al., 2018).

The key difference was in whether people were surface actors or deep actors.

People who fake their emotions experience the highest levels of physical and mental strain.

A disconnect between the emotion people display and the one they feel causes psychological damage, including emotional exhaustion.

In contrast, people who change how they feel inside and express this true emotion, feel the least strain.

The conclusions come from a study of how over 2,500 employees in a range of industries manage their emotions.

Dr Allison Gabriel, the study’s first author, said:

“What we wanted to know is whether people choose to engage in emotion regulation when interacting with their co-workers, why they choose to regulate their emotions if there is no formal rule requiring them to do so, and what benefits, if any, they get out of this effort.”

The key difference was in whether people were surface actors or deep actors.

Dr Gabriel explained the distinction:

“Surface acting is faking what you’re displaying to other people.

Inside, you may be upset or frustrated, but on the outside, you’re trying your best to be pleasant or positive.

Deep acting is trying to change how you feel inside.

When you’re deep acting, you’re actually trying to align how you feel with how you interact with other people.”

Most people, the study found, had to act at least a little at work.

However, the healthiest group were the deep actors.

Dr Gabriel explained:

“The main takeaway, is that deep actors—those who are really trying to be positive with their co-workers—do so for prosocial reasons and reap significant benefits from these efforts.”

Deep actors found they made the most progress towards their work goals and had the most trust from their co-workers.

In contrast, those who acted at both the surface level and deep down, experienced the most mental strain.

Dr Gabriel said:

“Regulators suffered the most on our markers of well-being, including increased levels of feeling emotionally exhausted and inauthentic at work.”

Dr Gabriel concluded:

“I think the ‘fake it until you make it’ idea suggests a survival tactic at work.

Maybe plastering on a smile to simply get out of an interaction is easier in the short run, but long term, it will undermine efforts to improve your health and the relationships you have at work.

In many ways, it all boils down to, ‘Let’s be nice to each other.’

Not only will people feel better, but people’s performance and social relationships can also improve.”

The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Gabriel et al., 2019).

People who dealt with emotions this way were happier and less likely to be depressed.

People who allow themselves to feel negative emotions are happier and less depressed.

Feeling emotions like anger and hatred at appropriate times is linked to greater satisfaction with life.

It is the first study of its kind to find this link between happiness and feeling negative emotions.

It makes sense given that positive emotions do not always have ‘good’ outcomes and negative emotions do not necessarily have ‘bad’ outcomes.

For example, love could make a person stay with an abusive partner.

Anger could help that person leave the abusive relationship.

Dr Maya Tamir, the study’s first author, said:

“Happiness is more than simply feeling pleasure and avoiding pain.

Happiness is about having experiences that are meaningful and valuable, including emotions that you think are the right ones to have.

All emotions can be positive in some contexts and negative in others, regardless of whether they are pleasant or unpleasant.”

In general, people naturally wanted to experience more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions.

Around one-in-ten people, though, said they experienced too much love and empathy.

Another one-in-ten said they wanted to feel more unpleasant emotions like hatred or anger.

Dr Tamir said:

“People want to feel very good all the time in Western cultures, especially in the United States.

Even if they feel good most of the time, they may still think that they should feel even better, which might make them less happy overall.”

The results come from surveys of 2,324 students in the US, Brazil, China, Germany, Ghana, Israel, Poland and Singapore.

They were asked about the emotions they actually felt and those they wanted to feel.

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Tamir et al., 2017).