You wouldn't know it from polling that indicates Floridians increasingly think the state is heading in the wrong direction, or our emotional health rankings from the Gallup Well-Being Survey, but apparently Florida is one of the happiest states in the nation. At least on Twitter.
PhD student Alex Davies has set up a system to analyze overall happiness and sadness of a state's population based on their Twitter updates.
Indicators of happiness includes tweets with words like nice, best, haha, music, and yummy. Using words like migraine, ugh, fuck, ouchies, and poor indicate sadness.
So according to the analysis, Florida is the fifth happiest state in the nation. Or, at the very least, we're more likely to keep our negative thoughts off Twitter. The South dominates the top of the list, with Tennessee coming in first, along with Georgia and North Carolina. Colorado, at number two, is the only non-Southern state in the top five.
Eight states with small populations weren't counted, but Neveda, land of legalized gambling and prostitution, comes in at the very bottom.
[via Gawker]
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