Gross National Happiness

I recently found this application for facebook, it's called the Gross National Happiness Index I have seen many of my friends on facebook use a counter to calculate the words they most use. Apparently this is now being done on a larger level evaluating all users of facebook to distinguish the levels of happiness in a country.

By counting the positive and negative words used in status updates they can generate a percent of happiness and compare it to specific days. Not surprising, in general positive attitudes drop significantly on Mondays and peak on the weekends. Holidays also tend to shoot up in positive statuses as well as have the greatest drops in negative statuses. Maybe it is just my sociological mind but I find these graphs very interesting to see and then try figure out why they look the way they do.

I first discovered this application when I came across this article about Australia's happiness index. In the article it refers to the "sorry day...That was the day Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered an apology to indigenous Australians." I then was curious at what the GNH index for the United States was when the Health Care bill passed. Unfortunately the graph currently only goes until 1:00 AM Sunday Morning before the debate had even started. I don't know about you but I will be checking back in a couple days to see the results. I'll post them when I find out.