If you are a girl just wants to have some fun, what will you do? Maybe go to the hair salon to have a perm, visit the spa to get yourself a classy manicure, or just having a romantic and intimate candle dinner with your boyfriend? Things might get different if you are a boy, maybe a game night will be great for you.
It can be interesting to observe how the two genders behave differently when perceiving happiness. Let's find out this difference by analyzing the HappyDB dataset, a corpus of 100,000 crowd-sourced happy moments via Amazon's Mechanical Turk, or to put it other way: a collection of happy moments described by individuals experiencing those moments.
How about their average happy moments?
In order to have a glimpse of the two genders'basic characteristics, the average happy moments per person will be shown below using a bar plot.
From the plot we can see that the number of men and women is approximately the same, while men have surprisingly more happy moments than women. Is this because men tend to act serious all the time but we don't know some minor things have already made them happy inside? I wonder what particular things make men happy. Therefore, let's move to the next stage.
What do they focus on?
In this part, I would like to know the concentrations of the two genders. Therefore, I counted the word frequency using the tm package for both genders and plotted the words using the wordcloud, with the most occurred word being the largest size and less common words being smaller sizes.
Here is the wordcloud for women. We can see that women feel happy when they think about family members ("husband", "son", "daughter") and they concentrate on emotion perception (the word "feel").
Here is the wordcloud for men. In contrast to women, men feel most happy when they are with friends. Although family is still among the top things that makes men happy ("wife", "family"), men seem not giving children a lot attention as women. I think maybe this is because women give birth to children and there is something natural inside them to feel happy when talking about children. Another interesting observation is that men like entertainment a lot ("played", "game", "watched"). In the top ten most frequent words, there are 3 words related to entertainment for men while only 1 word for women ("watched").
Therefore, we have found two areas that we want to study more: entertainment and family. Explore the differences between women and men in these two areas might lead to some interesting discoveries.
What do they differ in entertainment and family?
Entertainment
Let's look at the entertainment category first. I used the entertainment dictionary within the HappyDB dataset and count the word frequency according to the entertainment category within both genders. Here is a plot that shows the differences between the two groups.
We can see that the ranking of some specific words does show some difference. For example, women prefer reading to video games. Besides going to a movie, men find playing video games more pleasing than reading. In my opinion, maybe this is because women focus on emotion perception and novels have a lot of exciting plots which makes readers feel emotionally connected while they read. While for men, playing video games can "provide either very realistic, exaggerated or impossible physics", which satisfies their need to escape the real world.
Also, there is some common pattern that both genders enjoy listening to music and going to a concert. Maybe this is a why there is a therapy called musical therapy.
Family
Secondly, let's look at the family category. I used the same method as stated before and I changed the dictionary into family this time. There is a subtle difference between men and women: in the top 10 mentioned words, there is the word "baby" for women while no such word for men. Therefore, this proves the observation that children make women happier compared to men.
To conclude, women enjoy reading books while men enjoy playing games. And women like to be around with babies while men feel happy when being with family members.
How do they feel emotionally?
Lastly, I would like to find out how positive or negative the happy moments are for both genders. Sometimes we might feel happy for others' failure, and this can be a really negative happy moment. Therefore, I conducted the sentiment analysis which counts how often positive and negative words occured in these happy moments. What'smore, I also searched for the most positive and negative happy moments for both genders, and it is a really interesting finding.
Sentiment Analysis
I chose the top 25 words according to the sentiment score for both genders and visualize the result in the following plot. The word pointing to right means positive feeling while the one pointing to left means negative.
We can see that there is something interesting in the rankings of words. For example, the word won has a higher ranking for men than women. This actually proves the finding earlier that men like to play games because you have to compete to win to play a game. It seems like men enjoy the joy of winning.
And observing the general impression of positive words for men and women, we can find that women like physical contact such as hug and caring for others make them happy(the word care). But for men, things are different. Words like saved,win and won occur a lot. These words again lead to playing games. Other than games, I find the word award, which indicates personal achievements. And the word free also caught my eye. Does it mean "without cost" when we see "buy 1 get 1 free" or does it mean "not under the control" when we say "it's a free country"? Nevertheless, the concept of being free intrigues men.
Most extreme cases
Most positive happy moment
Here is the most positive happy moment for women. From this message, I feel the appreciation for nature and the description of birds chirping makes me feel very pleasant. Also the woman spent happy time with family members in this moment, which proves the observation that women feel happy when being with their families.
"LAST HAPPY MOMENT WAS WE ALL WENT TO A NEARBY BIRDS PARK. WITH THE FAMILY MEMBERS AND KIDS GOING TO THE BIRDS PARK WAS REALLY FUN. SEEN A VARIETY OF BIRDS, THEIR CHIRPING SOUND WAS REALLY VERY PLEASANT FOR THE EARS. ALSO SAW SOME UNSEEN BIRDS WHICH CAME TO THE PARK FOR BREEDING SEASON, IT WAS ALSO NICE. ALSO SAW FEW BIRDS HATCHING THEIR EGGS, FEW NEW BORN BIRDS WERE ALL FILLED WITH FUN AND HAPPY. SHOWING THOSE BIRDS TO KIDS WAS REALLY HAPPIEST MOMENT SINCE THEIR ENJOYMENT IN SEEING BIRDS WAS AWESOME. FINALLY THE FULL DAY WAS SPENT HAPPILY WITH FAMILY MEMBERS."
Here is the most positive happy moment for men. This moment is about the man taking his niece out to dinner for her birthday. Family members occurred twice in both happy moments. Maybe family really is an important factor to happiness for both genders.
"The event was my nieces' 5th birthday. I took her out to dinner for her birthday and she was so excited and it was such a fun day getting to see the joy and excitement on her face and the reminder of how fun birthday were at that age."
Most negative happy moment
Here is the most negative happy moment for women. The woman feels happy because there are issues between her ex-husband and his girlfriend. I noticed that this moment is about emotional issues. This also verifies women's happiness come from emotional satisfaction(although in here this emotion is really negative).
"My ex-husband finally acknowledged that there are problems in his new relationship. He's also acknowledged that he's going to have to address these issues. Since we still live together, this is a big help for me, when I previously believed he thought nothing was wrong. He's described events in this relationship that was troubling, but then kept saying they were no problem. His admission of trouble makes me worry less for him, and makes me worry less about the emotional mess that he'll be if they break up."
Here is the most negative happy moment for men. I think the reason that this one is negative is because the extensive use of profanity here. Besides the curse words, everything seems pretty normal when compared to women's negative happy moment. Maybe sometimes women tend to think too much and that is the reason why they have less happy moments than men.
"I was happy three weeks ago when my surgeon pulled out the drainage compartment that I had in my abdomen and I was finally done with having to fuck around with doctors, that shit stings like hell by the way, there is a tiny hole it comes out of but man you can feel it, glad to be done with that mess."
Summary
By analyzing the HappyDB dataset on men and women separately, we could get the following results.
Men are easier to feel happy than women, and playing games often makes men happy.
Women are less likely to feel happy, and children often makes them happy.
Both genders feel happy when they are with family members.
References
Silge, Julia, and David Robinson. "Text Mining with R." Text Mining with R, 18 Aug. 2018, www.tidytextmining.com/.
Asai, A., Evensen, S., Golshan, B., Halevy, A., Li, V., Lopatenko, A., . . . Xu, Y. (2018, May). [HappyDB: A Corpus of 100,000 Crowdsourced Happy Moments].
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