The Penn team collaborated with Mic

The Penn team collaborated with Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell of The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge, who originally collected the data from Facebook users.

The researchers’ study draws on a long history of studying the words people use as a way of understanding their feelings and mental states, but took an “open” rather than “closed” approach to analyzing the data at its core.

“In a ‘closed vocabulary’ approach,” Kern said, “psychologists might pick a list of words they think signal positive emotion, like ‘contented,’ ‘enthusiastic’ or ‘wonderful’ and then look at the frequency of a person’s use of these words as a way to measure how happy that person is. However, closed vocabulary approaches have several limitations, including that they do not always measure what they intend to measure.”