Social mood in Finland shifted from generally positive in the spring of 2006 to generally negative by the spring of 2009. We identify this change in mood via eight indicators, including the onset of a financial and macroeconomic crisis, a decline in measures of sentiment, a rise in radical politics and the demise of an iconic business unit of one of the country's most successful firms. From the standpoint of Prechter's socionomic theory we hypothesise that this change in social mood is also evident in a greater level of pessimism in the songs on the country's pop chart in 2009 relative to 2006. To test this hypothesis, we introduce and validate a tool to measure optimism and pessimism in popular music. We apply this tool to a random sample of songs from the Finnish pop chart from 2006 and a comparable sample from 2009. Indeed, we find that the sample from 2009 in the aggregate is substantially and significantly more pessimistic than the sample from 2006. The study serves to enrich our understanding of what makes pop songs popular and how popular music is linked psychologically to broader popular culture and other domains of social expression through a shared social mood.

中文翻译：

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从“Hard Rock Hallelujah”到 Nokialand 的“Ukonhauta”：从社会经济学角度看 2006 年至 2009 年芬兰流行音乐的情绪转变

芬兰的社会情绪从 2006 年春季的普遍积极转变为 2009 年春季的普遍消极。我们通过八个指标来识别这种情绪变化，包括金融和宏观经济危机的爆发、情绪指标的下降、激进政治的兴起以及该国最成功公司之一的标志性业务部门的消亡。从 Prechter 的社会经济学理论的角度来看，我们假设社会情绪的这种变化在 2009 年该国流行榜上的歌曲相对于 2006 年的悲观情绪中也很明显。为了验证这一假设，我们引入并验证了一个工具衡量流行音乐中的乐观情绪和悲观情绪。我们将此工具应用于 2006 年芬兰流行音乐排行榜中的随机歌曲样本和 2009 年的可比较样本。确实，