Go to the homepage of the website and click on start. You will see a word in green. You need to select one of the four words below that you most associate with the word in green. You may not completely connect with any of the words but just select the one that you consider closest. Don't think too hard. Just relax and go with it !
It's not a problem. You may find it easier just to 'not' select ones that you are sure you don't like and move on. There's 15 questions and if you really aren't sure about a few of them it will only have a small affect on the overall score.
No. Whatever word you enter will never be 'wrong'. It's not always what you think either. The algorithm that we use doesn't necessarily consider whether answers are 'sad' or 'happy'. It looks for trends as well to see whether the answers vary and patterns vary.
Sort of. The time it takes to select an answer is actually fed into the algorithm. There is some evidence in word association that how long you take to respond is an important factor on whether you consider the answer to be something you should admit to ! The idea is that if you see a word that represents what you want to say but you aren't sure whether you should say it then you will delay your response. The conviction of thought has a bearing on whether you sure in your actions and therefore a lack of confidence can have an effect on your ability to achieve daily tasks. Possibly, this may make you unhappy. We aren't sure about all of this but we feed the data into the Neural Network anyway and let it decide !
The system then uses a complex alogrithm to try and understand the words that you have used against the master words. We then work out whether or not we think you are happy. To be honest, we aren't 100% sure how it does it. The Neural Network acts like a 'brain', taking data entry points and associating them with other data points to try and achieve a consistent answer. The database has been 'taught' because every now and again by using test data from various sources.
We provide you with a result as a simple percentage whereby 100% means you are very happy and 0% means you are very sad.
It's getting better. It's not scientific and it doesn't provide a truly accurate or medical way of measuring your happiness. But as a bit of fun in itself, have a go !