IF YOU BELIEVE TWITTER, THESE ARE THE "HAPPIEST AND SADDEST STATES"
Hawaii and Napa, California are (allegedly) the happiest state and city, respectively, in a recent study of (geotagged) tweets.
Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont round-out the top five happiest states list, following Hawaii.
Louisiana was found to be the saddest state, followed by Mississippi, Maryland, Michigan and Delaware.
CITIES
Vacation destination Napa, California, was found to be one of the happiest cities along with Longmont, Colorado; San Clemente, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Santa Cruz, California.
The five most bummed-out cities according to average word choices were Beaumont, Texas; Albany, Georgia; Texas City, Texas; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Monroe, Louisiana. Again, researchers found liberal use of swear words to be a key factor in a city's overall happiness score.
Coastal areas were more chipper than landlocked areas, and the cities with a higher density of tweets tended to be less happy.
THE STUDY:
Researchers at the University of Vermont sifted through more than 10 million geotagged tweets from 2011 to map out the moods of Americans in urban areas. They ranked the locations based on frequency of positive and negative words using (something called) the Mechanical Turk Language Assessment word list.
The list includes 10,000 words that have been rated on a scale 1 to 10 according to how "happy" they are.
-- On the lower end of the scale are negative words such as mad, hate, no, boo, smoke and jail, as well as an assortment of expletives.
-- Happy words include LOL and haha, as well as good, nice, sleep and wine, and food or beach related words.
