Yes, we love Mondays - our tweets say so

A sharp increase in bloggers' use of the word 'proud' showed that Barack Obama's election on November 4 last year was the happiest day in four years. Photo / Getty Images

The Boomtown Rats were wrong - we do like Mondays.

The first day back at work after the weekend was always assumed to be the day we are most miserable, but it is the second happiest day of the week.

We feel at our worst on Wednesdays, researchers claim.

Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth, applied mathematicians at the advanced computing centre of the University of Vermont in the US, believe they have devised a system of measuring collective happiness - something that has frustrated social scientists for decades.

They studied people's feelings by analysing blogs and tweets.

"We were able to make observations of people in a fairly natural environment at a magnitude higher than previous happiness studies," Dr Danforth said.

"They think they are communicating with friends, but since blogs are public, we're just looking over their shoulders."

The pair studied 2.4 million blogs written during the past four years and awarded each a score on a scale of one to nine based on use of words that bear meaningful emotional content.

So "triumphant", "paradise" and "love" all scored high, and "trauma", "funeral" and "suicide" were at the opposite end of the scale.

Abstract words such as "pancakes" and "street" scored above average.

Dr Danforth said people blogged on Sunday what they did on Saturday night and their sentiments on Monday might still reflect good memories of the weekend.

By the middle of the week, people were at their lowest point.

More than 10 million sentences were electronically scanned, looking for those beginning with "I feel" or "I am feeling", and the results - which appear in the Journal of Happiness Studies - showed that Barack Obama's election on November 4 last year was the happiest day in four years, demonstrated by a sharp increase in the word "proud".

Michael Jackson's death in June was one of the unhappiest.

The happiest people were those aged between 45 and 60, and teenagers were the grumpiest.

More than 230,000 songs by 20,025 artists were also studied.

The Beach Boys, Buddy Holly and S Club 7 scored more than seven on the happiness scale; US thrash metal merchants Slayer and Slipknot and Norwegian black metallers Darkthrone were at the bottom of the table.

Dr Dodds said the study ignored context, so a song such as Ryan Adams' Love is Hell would score 5.5, averaging 8.7 (love) and 2.2 (hell).

But specific figures such as this were not significant.

"What we're trying to do is measure collective happiness on a much larger scale, similar to measuring the temperature outside," he said.

"The energy of a few molecules bouncing around doesn't give a good indication of heat - you need billions or more. I'd be more comfortable with the measure we come up with for the entire body of Adams' work, or all of pop music (6.7)."

* Ups and downs

Happy words - scored out of 9

Affection 8.39
Beauty 7.82
Comedy 8.37
Free 8.26
Fun 8.37
Pillow 7.92
Rainbow 8.14
Rollercoaster 8.02
Sex 8.05
Win 8.38

Sad words - scored out of 9

Betray 1.68
Cruel 1.97
Hatred 1.98
Hurt 1.90
Useless 2.13
Seasick 2.05
Slave .84
Suffocate 1.56
Ulcer 1.78
Unfaithful 2.05

- OBSERVER