Can air pollution influence happiness? MIT says yes

The consumption of red meat , the massive use of cars, as well as smoking and even economic activities, produce pollution.



Pollution leaves us with serious consequences in our body, such as problems in the throat or even in the lungs. However, it not only affects us on a physiological level, pollution also affects us on an emotional level.



Can air pollution influence happiness?

According to research from the Massachusetts France Mobile Number List Institute of Technology (MIT), air pollution in cities like China can contribute to the increase in low levels of happiness in the country's population.



And research has shown that the moods expressed on social networks tend to decrease when the situation worsens.







Air pollution in cities like China can contribute to the increase in low levels of happiness in the country's population: MIT



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The results, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior , show that high levels of pollution are associated with a drop in people's happiness levels.



According to MIT, although China registers an annual economic growth rate of 8%, satisfaction levels among that nation's urban population are not increasing as expected.



Siqui Zheng, leader of the research, says that this environmental condition, in addition to being harmful to health, cognitive performance, work productivity and educational results, has a broader impact on social life, as well as on people's behavior.



«Pollution also has an emotional cost. “People are unhappy, and that means they can make irrational decisions.”



It has been shown, according to the specialist, that on days when there is worse air quality, residents are more likely to carry out impulsive or risky acts, as a result of short-term depression or anxiety.



To reach the conclusions, the researchers used real-time data from social media to track how changes in daily pollution levels affect people's happiness in 144 Chinese cities.







They also used information on urban levels of ultrafine particles from daily air quality readings that are published by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection.



"Social media offers a real-time measure of people's happiness levels and also provides a wealth of data across many different cities."



How did you measure the level of happiness?

The team of researchers used a machine learning algorithm to analyze more than 200 million geotagged tweets from China's largest microblogging platform, Sina Weibo .



In this way they were able to measure the level of happiness, in addition to having applied a sentiment analysis algorithm trained on the machine and calculating the median value for that city.







They decided to merge the index with the daily concentration of PM 2.5 and climate data, in which they found a negative correlation between pollution and happiness levels.