App Reveals Which Of Your Facebook Friends Makes You The Happiest

A new app can reveal which of your Facebook friends makes you the happiest.

To determine this, the tool assesses mutual friends, who you appear with in photos, and whose posts you’ve frequently liked or engaged with, explains a report in TIME.

This app’s methodology, known as Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, is a technology pioneered by a researcher at the University of Texas – which is accessible here.

The app disclaimer notes that an extension of the tool will not post to the user’s social media profile, nor will it store user data.

The application takes a few seconds to analyze the posting behavior of the user’s top 25 Facebook friends, ignoring anyone who has written fewer than 10 status updates in the past year or whose privacy settings hide their posts from apps.

It then assigns a score. The score assigned to the user, and to each of their top friends, ranks everyone on the percentage of posts that are positive out of all posts with at least one positive or negative word.

Friends who have engaged less frequently are listed further down at the bottom of the ranking.

This app uses the same method as the one University of California, San Diego researchers used when they evaluated and reported the effect of contagious emotions among Facebook friends – measuring the positivity and negativity of shared posts based on key words.

Back in March, Social News Daily reported on how emotional Facebook posts are contagious, using an analysis of more than one billion anonymous status updates posted by more than 100 million Facebook users across the United States.

A collaborative team – made up of University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Yale, and Facebook researchers – scrutinized the generous sample of Facebook data collected between January 2009 and March 2012

They found Facebook posts expressing real life emotions regarding their feelings infected others in cyberspace and dictated both good and bad moods of the Facebook friends who read them; influencing the tone of their successive posts.

The UCSD study found positive emotional posts appeared to be even more contagious than negative ones. For every person who posted a positive status update, 1.75 percent of his or her friends also posted a positive status update.

[Photo Credit: luc legay]