The U.K. Maps Their Happiness With the iPhone

mappiness is a free iPhone application which tracks people’s feelings across the United Kingdom.   Created by George MacKerron and Susana Mourato of the London School of Economics and Political Science, the project aims to better understand how emotions are affected by a person’s immediate environment.

Reportedly the first of its kind, the app ‘beeps’ users one or more times a day, enquiring on a movable scale how ‘happy’, ‘relaxed’ and ‘awake’ they are.  GPS maps the current geographical location and links up with environmental data or the area.  Pollution, noise, weather conditions and the presence of ‘green’ areas are mapped alongside emotion responses and sent to a confidential data store. mappiness app owners currently outside also have the option of submitting photos of their surroundings. The results are displayed in real time on their website, plotting the U.K.’s average emotions against current information received.

Users of the application can also view records of their own emotional records, and perhaps identify optimum conditions for emotional well-being.

On the project researcher George MacKerron states;

Tracking happiness through time alone is an idea with history: in the 19th century economists imagined a ‘hedonimeter’, a perfect happiness gauge, and psychologists have more recently run small-scale ‘experience sampling’ studies to see how mood varies with activity, time of day, and so on.

What’s exciting here is the addition of the spatial dimension. By tracking across space as well as time, and by making novel use of a technology that millions of people already carry with them, we hope to find better answers to questions about the impacts of natural beauty, environmental problems — maybe even aspects of climate — on individual and national wellbeing.

mappiness can be used by those not residing in the U.K., although their data will not contribute towards the research.

The app can be found in the iTunes store here.

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[via fresh + new(er)]