Study of 10 million tweets reveals Hawaii is the happiest state (no surprises there) while Louisiana is the saddest



10 million tweets including 80 million words from 373 different cities across the United States used in new study from University of Vermont

States on the West Coast and Hawaii revealed as the happiest - while the Rust Belt and South are declared the unhappiest




A new study conducted by scientists at the University of Vermont has used Twitter to establish that Hawaii is the happiest state in the union and Louisiana the saddest.



Looking at 10 million tweets posted from 373 different sites across the country, the team ranked the saddest and happiest states and cities based on the frequency of happy and sad words posted onto the social networking site.



Dubbing the mathematical formula created to collate the information as a 'hedonometer', the scientists discovered that Napa, California was the happiest city, while Beaumont in Texas ranked as the most miserable.

State in deeper blue are most unhappy according to the 10 million tweets used in the University of Vermont study, while the deep red states are happiest

Out of the 80 million or so words examined, the scientists used Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service to enable them to locate the words they had deemed for their study to be happy or sad.

Words such as love, beauty, hope, wonderful and rainbow were designated happy, while boo, ugly, damn, smoke, hate and lied were decided to represent an unhappy state of mind.

The study conducted through geographical tweets from 2008 to 2011 revealed that Napa, California was the happiest city in the United States The beautiful vista of Napa, California - known for wine growing and according to a new study its particularly happy residents

'Our overall objective is to use web-scale text analysis to remotely sense societal-scale levels of happiness using the singular source of the micro-blog and social networking service Twitter,' the study's introduction says according to The Atlantic.

As a broad sweep the study revealed that the Bible belt stretching across the south and into Texas was less happy than the West Coast and New England.



However, the exception that proved this rule was Waterbury, Connecticut which has previously appeared on many different 'worst places in the country to live' lists.

Explaining the study is a graph below that has the positive and negative phrases next to them and up or down arrows.



The plus or minus shows whether the word is considered happy or sad. While the up or down arrow points to whether the word was used more or less so in each city - in this case the happiest, Napa and the saddest, Beaumont.



Using the word 's**t' as an example of a negative word, it was clearly used less in Napa than in Beaumont. The bars in the graphs show that the lack of the use of that word in Napa helped it rise to the top, whith the opposite being true for Beaumont.



In fact, looking at Beaumont, it is clear to see that the only positive words on its graph or lol and haha, while the rest were negative.

How Twitter was used to collate information to determine how happy Napa, California was compared to Beaumont, Texas

Critics of the list point out that using Twitter is not the most scientific or comprehensive way to compile a list such as this.

The list does not seem to take into account differences in language use among different cities, states and demographic and gender groups across the country.



The University of Vermont scientists identified people with Norwegian ancestry to be happier than African Americans, which could simply mean that Norwegian Americans use breezier language.

Cities through the American Rust Belt and South are revealed to make up the unhappiest cities - with Waterbury, Connecticut standing out as an exception

Beaumont, Texas, USA - This Dupont Industries facility was on the top ten list of largest total toxic chemical factories in the 1990s

However, in the research paper, it is pointed out that the list correlates with other existing Gallup surveys of happiness across the country and that their data matches income and obesity rates too.



Countering that, critics have said that the top two spots in terms of city and state, Napa and Hawaii, are both vacation spots, while Beaumont is not.



Indeed, Dean Hickman, who is the department of psychiatry chairman at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans has said that this data directly contradicts a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2009.



Their research placed Louisiana as the happiest state and their survey was based on four-years across 1.3 million people across the country.

