If you ever wondered whether someone cares about how you were feeling when you posted your social media status update, be assured that a group of applied mathematicians from the University of Vermont do care.
They charted our words on Twitter to find the happiest and saddest states in the United States. Their findings are published in a report titled “The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place.”
“One of our main philosophies here is that happiness is a fundamental sort of metric about society,” said Lewis Mitchell, a postdoctoral researcher with the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont—the group that conducted the research and authored the report.
Happiness or unhappiness, in the eyes of the research group, is important to a society. Happiness levels are just as important as a society’s economic indicators, such as gross domestic product (GDP) or unemployment rates, according to Mitchell.
The group used geotagged tweets to figure out what people are talking about—and where they are talking about it. They then surveyed the characteristics of every state and close to 400 urban populations.
With the two sets of data combined—what and where—they figured out how people might be feeling across different locations.
The Results
“Southern states tend to produce sadder words than those in northern New England or out west,” Mitchell wrote on the group’s blog.
In the study, the 10 happiest states—based on words used on Twitter—were Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah, Vermont, Colorado, Idaho, New Hampshire, Washington, and Wyoming, in that order.
People in Hawaii tweeted words like “hi,” “beach,” “thanks,” “pearl,” “coffee,” “resort,” “shopping,” “island,” and “happy.”
The 10 not-so-happy states, starting with the unhappiest, were Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware, Georgia, Alabama, Michigan, D.C., Arkansas, and Ohio.
People in Louisiana tweeted words like “lol,” “pressure,” “ain’t,” “gone,” “me,” and profane words.
A Closer Look at NYC
According to the authors, they created a happiness text-based hedonometer that they describe as “tunable, real-time, remote-sensing, and non-invasive.” It essentially measures happiness.
Putting their hedonometer to the test on their blog, they set out to find the happiest street corner in New York.
“The happiest ‘corner’ is actually just inside the western edge of Central Park, where the intersection of 7th and 77th would be (this is just north of the lake and east of the Hayden Planetarium),” Mitchell reported on the blog.
Positive words like “love” and “sky” were used more on the corner’s tweets, while negative words like “not,” “fear,” and “no,” were used less on the corner’s tweets.
Overall, he reported that the west side is slightly happier than the east side, and that happiness actually declines as one moves further uptown.
“Many of the happiest locations actually fall within Central Park!” he wrote.
The research group keeps a disclaimer on their blog about the project being “a fun and lighthearted exploration.”
Happy Times
In 2011, the mathematicians published another report titled “Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter.”
