It’s easy to figure out why Hawaii would be the happiest state in the country, but Connecticut, why so sad?
A new study out of the University of Vermont, “The Geography of Happiness,” found that our state is among the bottom third in the country on the happiness scale. Connecticut ranked 14th in the study, with Louisiana coming in as the saddest state in the nation and Mississippi the second saddest.
Researchers at the university came up with the rankings by analyzing the tweets of some 10 million Twitter users in 373 urban areas in the U.S. in 2011.
After Hawaii, the top five states that ranked the highest in the study were Maine, Nevada, Utah, Vermont and Colorado.
The five saddest after Louisiana and Mississippi were Maryland, Delaware, Georgia, Alabama and Michigan.
The study also analyzed the happiness rankings of major cities and urban areas. Napa, Calif., earned the top happiness ranking in the study, with Idaho Falls, Idaho, coming in second. Beaumont, Texas, ranked as the saddest.
In Connecticut, the Norwich-New London urban area came in 188th in the rankings of urban areas, making it the happiest in the state.
While the study looked at the fairly light-hearted issue of happiness, the methodolgy used in the research, the study's authors said, can be translated into other areas, such as examining why some areas of the country have higher obesity rates than others.
