Facebook's 'Gross National Happiness' App Indicates Which Countries Need Prozac

Last year, Facebook unveiled its Gross National Happiness app, a prototype that gauges the emotional well-being of users by scanning user status updates for "happy" words like "yay" and "awesome," or for "unhappy" words like "doubt" and "tragic." Originally, the methodology was applied only to American users, but as Mashable reports, the social networking site has now broadened it to include 18 different countries, spanning status updates in six different languages.

By restricting their scope to the languages most commonly used in status updates -- English, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish -- Facebook's researchers could use a sample size large enough to effectively negate any variations in word usage, or other random errors.

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[Source: Switched]