Why we think of money in the morning and passion at night

IT MAY not feel like it until you’ve had that morning coffee, but Britons are at their most dynamic and go-getting before 9am.

Heading to work in rush hour is the time when we think most about careers, power, money and achievement, a study of 800million tweets has found. After dinner, we are more likely to be preoccupied with sex and relationships.

A four-year study by Bristol University of Twitter users across Britain shows how priorities shift during the day. The morning is all about logical, driven thinking, but in the evening they become more emotional as thoughts turn to sex, death and loved ones. And despite the working day being done, people are angrier at night – which may explain the number of Twitter outbursts around this time.

Researchers analysed seven billion words in tweets from 54 of the UK’s largest towns and cities. Professor Nello Cristianini, who led the study, said: ‘This allows us to discover how people think in a collective way, and the daily, weekly and seasonal patterns of their emotions and thoughts. People’s psychology is different in the morning from the evening, and that leaks out in their choice of words. Twitter is a better way to judge this than asking people to describe their emotions, which they may misreport or fail to recall.’

The results allowed researchers to track the nation’s mood, finding, unsurprisingly that Sunday seems to be the best day of the week, with people least likely to be grumpy. Midnight is when people are likely to be most risqué in their messages on the social media site, according to the study published in the journal Plos One.