The Geography of Happiness – As Measured by 10 Million Tweets

In a new study published by the Vermont Complex Systems Center, researchers investigated correlations between the content of tweets from across the U.S. and their geographic origin.

The researchers used Mechanical Turk to rate the sentiment of 10 million geo-coded tweets collected over the course of one year. For instance, words like rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, and wine were considered by Workers to be happy; whereas words like damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, and lied are examples of words considered to be sad.

So, what city was determined to be the happiest? Apparently, Napa, CA is the happiest city in the country. By contrast, Beaumont, TX is the saddest city. Louisiana was determined to be the saddest state. Maybe not surprisingly, Hawaii was rated as the happiest state.

To learn more, check out The Atlantic’s recent coverage of the study and their commentary on results. For more detail - including more analysis on how the tweets correlated with a wide range of emotional, demographic and health characteristics – read the entire study online at arXive.org.

 

FIG. 1: Choropleth showing average word happiness for geotagged tweets in all US states collected during the calendar year 2011. The happiest 5 states, in order, are: Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont. The saddest 5 states, in order, are: Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia.