A new iPhone app: The Happiness App.

The app is called “Mappiness” and it tracks happiness in the UK. According to Tonic.com, the goal of the app is “to help researchers wrap their heads around how our moods are affected by our environments”.

Tonic.com also explains how it works: “the app asks users to say how they’re feeling at a random time each day and uses their phone's built-in GPS to locate them. The app asks how "happy," how "relaxed" and how "awake" they feel using sliding scales. It also asks for brief contextual information such as what respondents are doing and who they're with”. Recombu.com adds that once you did that, the “data is then sent to the LSE's team anonymously, with your location, and they'll crunch all the data to draw some Big Conclusions”.

According to Techcrunch.com George MacKerron, the lead researcher, said about how he elaborated on the idea of tracking happiness: “In the 19th century economists imagined a ‘hedonometer,’ 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”.

For your information, this app is a free download available at Apple's App Store and is compatible with all iPhone models. You can also visit the website www.mappiness.org.uk. By Patricia Rivero.