(CNN) -- If you're sick of cheerful, happy people, it might
be wise to avoid Hawaii or Napa, California. They were found to be the United
States' happiest state and city, respectively, in a recent study of
geotagged tweets.
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 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 a colorful and thorough assortment of expletives.
Happy words include the
omnipresent LOL and haha, as well as good, nice, sleep and wine, and food or
beach related words. According to the list, rainbow is one of the happiest words
and earthquake is one of the saddest.
Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont
round-out the top five happiest states list, following rainbow and beach-filled
Hawaii. Louisiana was found to be the saddest state, followed by Mississippi,
Maryland, Michigan and Delaware. One reason for Louisiana's low cheeriness
ranking (they must not have measured during Mardi Gras) is its inhabitants'
fondness for profanity.
The study, which was broken down
by The Atlantic, also looked at the results for 373 urban areas
to rank the happiest and least-happy cities. Vacation destination Napa,
California, was determined 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.
"This suggests that cities with
high technology adoption rates (as most geotagged tweets come from devices like
smartphones) are in fact less happy than their less technological counterparts,"
says the study.
The researchers took their
results and compared them against census data and found that wealthy areas
tended to have higher happiness levels and that areas with high rates of obesity
has lower happiness levels.
They looked at obesity rates and
food words to create lists of low and high-obesity words. The terms McDonalds,
wings, ham and heartburn were popular in high-obesity areas, while words such as
cafe, sushi, brewery and banana were more common in low-obesity areas.
The research shows that social
networks have a lot of promise for these types of surveys, and also that there
are still some major limitations. Researchers point out that only 15% of online
adults are using Twitter, and those users don't accurately represent the
demographics of the United States.
The group will once again dig
into tweets for even more research once the 2012 census data is released.
States in red have the highest average amount of happy tweets. States in blue states have more sad tweets. COURTESY GRAPHIC
