A hedonometer or hedonimeter is a device used to gauge happiness or pleasure. Conceived of at least as early as 1880[1], the term was used in 1881 by the economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth to describe "an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine, continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual."[2] More recently, it has been used to refer to a tool developed by Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth to gauge the valence of various corpora, including historical State of the Union addresses, song lyrics, and online tweets and blogs.[3][4]
In 1881, the optimistic Irish economist Francis Edgeworth imagined a strange device called a "hedonimeter" that would be capable of "continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual." In other words, a happiness sensor.
How to record how millions of people around the world were feeling on any day, is this possible — without their knowing?
"That's exactly what Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist working in the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, have created. Their methods show that Election Day, November 4, 2008, was the happiest day in four years. The day of Michael Jackson's death, one of the unhappiest. Their results are reported this week in the Journal of Happiness Studies." This quoted from physorg.com/news, socialsciences http://www.physorg.com/news167661927.html