Analyzing the Impact of Cultural Factors on Happiness Levels in Arabic Language Tweets
Conference Year
2024
Abstract
Culture is a fundamental force shaping our view of the world. Filtered through the stories we share on social media, our collective behavior both reflects and amplifies cultural impacts. The present study seeks to describe the effect of cultural factors, such as religion, on happiness scores in Arabic language tweets from January 2010 through May 2023. Our methodology involves using Hedonometer (https://hedonometer.org/) to study happy and sad events and StoryWrangler (https://storywrangling.org/) to study the usage of keywords related to those events. Our findings reveal a notable pattern of Arabic Twitter happiness declining following the start of the Arab Spring in 2010, and this decline persisted until around 2013. This pattern reflects the long-lasting impact of significant Arab Spring events. Arabic culture seems to be heavily influenced by religion, with religion often being the driving force behind happy events, while acts of violence and conflict related to political and religious injustice are associated with sad events.
Primary Faculty Mentor Name
Chris Danforth
Status
Graduate
Student College
College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences
Program/Major
Computer Science
Primary Research Category
Social Science
Analyzing the Impact of Cultural Factors on Happiness Levels in Arabic Language Tweets
Culture is a fundamental force shaping our view of the world. Filtered through the stories we share on social media, our collective behavior both reflects and amplifies cultural impacts. The present study seeks to describe the effect of cultural factors, such as religion, on happiness scores in Arabic language tweets from January 2010 through May 2023. Our methodology involves using Hedonometer (https://hedonometer.org/) to study happy and sad events and StoryWrangler (https://storywrangling.org/) to study the usage of keywords related to those events. Our findings reveal a notable pattern of Arabic Twitter happiness declining following the start of the Arab Spring in 2010, and this decline persisted until around 2013. This pattern reflects the long-lasting impact of significant Arab Spring events. Arabic culture seems to be heavily influenced by religion, with religion often being the driving force behind happy events, while acts of violence and conflict related to political and religious injustice are associated with sad events.