Positive moods appear to be correlated with those in your Twitter social network - up to three links away, according to a new study published in the Journal of Computational Science by graduate student Catherine Bliss, professors Christopher Danforth and Peter Dodds and their research team in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

Researchers used a “hedomenter” for scoring the happiness level of words used in a tweet, measured on a scale of one to nine, with “love” rating 8.42 and “die” coming in at 1.74. “The study,” according to the UK Huffington Post, “computed the happiness of each user by applying this ‘hedometer’ to all tweets authored by the user.” Using this measure, contentment levels are higher the closer a user is to those who are very happy and declines with the degree of separation. Read the story…