Daily Cycles in Twitter Content: Psychometric Indicators

Here is a YouTube video that summarizes some research findings. The researchers looked at Tweets in order to study how are focus and emotions change with our sleep/wake cycles.

And the findings are interesting and not terribly surprising. Folks are mellow and rational in the morning and contemplate their mortality at 2 AM.

Make money, get paid.

And THIS is why I go to bed by 9 AM. I don't need to think about death at 2:20 AM.

How to use in class:

1) Archival data (via Tweet) to explore human emotion.
2) What are the shortcomings of this sample method. To be sure, their data set is ENORMOUS, but how are Twitter users different from other people? Do your students think these findings would hold for people who work the night shift?
3) Go back to the original paper and look more closely at the findings: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0197002
4) This data represents one of the ways that researchers collect real-time information on emotional states. Remember when we used to give participants beepers and notebooks to record their emotions?
5) Is it ethical to use this research this way? Does this come under the umbrella of Terms of Service or do your students think that participants should have the chance to opt out of having their data used this way?

Comments

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