Today’s burning question, surely more important than who will be the next Prime Minister, is this: exactly who are the happiest celebrities on the planet?
Ed Cochrane, a PhD researcher, and Dr Martin Peddle, both at the University of Edinburgh, think they know the answer. The happiest celebrity of all is the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal. The happiest British celebrity is Jonathan Ross, at number three on the list, with cyclist Lance Armstrong pipping him to the number two slot. The least happy celebrity of all is rapper Snoop Dogg.
How have Cochrane and Peddle come to this conclusion? By analysing twitter feeds, of course. They used a ‘computerised emotional processor which analysed free text’ (brilliantly, this is a computer program called Emo Text. Designed by teenagers dressed in black and listening to Good Charlotte, presumably). Thirteen celebrity twitter feeds were analysed, selected from a list of ‘top celebrity tweeters’. If you want to look at the whole list with more detailed discussion, then you can see more here.
Cochrane and Peddle don’t actually claim to have identified the happiest celebrity, that’s just a bit of crafty PR. What they hope, though, is that Emo Text software can be used in future to analyse the language we use in online messages and, from that, gain a better idea of what others are thinking and feeling.
But how honest are any of us when we tweet, or post messages on Facebook (or even when we write a letter)? We self-edit to maintain a certain image, even when we only have 140 characters to play with, so are any of our messages an accurate reflection of our emotional state? Cochrane says that he hopes this software might be used to analyse the ‘emotional content of what politicians say and the response of voters’ — surely the past week has taught us our public response to politicians doesn’t always translate into votes.
So it will be interesting to see what Emo Text is used for in the future. Incidentally, only one female celebrity made the top 13. Britney Spears ranked joint seventh happiest, alongside Barack Obama and Philip Schofield. Imagine putting those three together in any other context….
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