From The Atlantic:
"Sorry, Louisiana, you are the saddest state. And Hawaii (shocker!) you are the happiest.
That's according to a team at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, who posted their new analysis of 10 million geotagged tweets to to arXiv.org. They call their creation a 'hedonometer.'"
The article went on to explain: "The researchers coded each tweet for its happiness content, based on the appearance and frequency of words determined by Mechanical Turk workers to be happy (rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, wine) or sad (damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, lied). While the researchers admit their technique ignores context, they say that for large datasets, simply counting the words and averaging their happiness content produces 'reliable' 'results.'"