Dennis RomeroLos Angeles might not have made this list of happy cities, but three Southern California towns did. (Are we then, happy by association?).
And the University of Vermont found that California was a top 13 happy state and that Napa was the nation's happiest city. They did so by analyzing 10 million geotagged tweets gathered from 373 urban areas and then giving weight to key happy terms such as LOL, good, beautiful and, yes, happy:
California as a whole made this scene big-time.
Researchers sorted out the 15 happiest cities in the United States and seven California towns made the list. Three, including San Clemente (3), Simi Valley (8) and Santa Barbara (14), are in Southern California.
Oh, and no California cities made the list of unhappy places.
Credit: University of Vermont
The Vermont academics found that higher rates of geographic happiness correlated with lower rates of obesity.
The Twitter study also seems to confirm the idea that those with money tend to at least express that they're happy. Many of those happy towns are also rich towns. Researchers:
Happiness within the US was found to correlate strongly with wealth, showing largest positive correlation with household income and strongest negative correlation with poverty amongst the census data sets used.
Happy now?
[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]
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