The Pursuit of Happiness
MAT 259A, 2018
April Cai
Concept
What makes us happy, and what sustains this happiness over time? A huge database is making it possible to discern the answer at last.
Happiness is not a uniform state that can be switched on and off on demand. Instead, it is a state or set of states that can be triggered by a rich tapestry of conditions and permutations of them. And yet there has been relatively little work that teases apart the nature of these conditions and how they arise.
By asking crowdworkers the question: what made you happy in the past 24 hours (or alternatively, the past 3 months)?
Here are some of the happy moments:
1. My son gave me a big hug in the morning when I woke him up.
2. I finally managed to make 40 pushups.
3. I had dinner with my husband.
The dataset is categorized into 7 categories: Achievement， Affection, Bonding, Enjoy the moment, Exercise, Leisure, Nature.
Since the dataset divide seven categories, seven is a very interesting number to represent. Classical elements typically refer to the concepts in ancient Greece of earth, water, air, fire, and aether, which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances.
Happiness is not a uniform state that can be switched on and off on demand. Instead, it is a state or set of states that can be triggered by a rich tapestry of conditions and permutations of them. And yet there has been relatively little work that teases apart the nature of these conditions and how they arise.
By asking crowdworkers the question: what made you happy in the past 24 hours (or alternatively, the past 3 months)?
Here are some of the happy moments:
1. My son gave me a big hug in the morning when I woke him up.
2. I finally managed to make 40 pushups.
3. I had dinner with my husband.
The dataset is categorized into 7 categories: Achievement， Affection, Bonding, Enjoy the moment, Exercise, Leisure, Nature.
Since the dataset divide seven categories, seven is a very interesting number to represent. Classical elements typically refer to the concepts in ancient Greece of earth, water, air, fire, and aether, which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances.
Preliminary sketches
I got my inspiration from the toy that we all love to have when we were kids - pinwheel.
Process
Some work-in-progress.
Final result
Happiness is a diverse corpus with content that is emotionally rich and covers various topics
It is helpful that HappyDB can spur research of the topic of understanding happy moments and more generally, the expression of emotions in text.
Code