Boston is Miserable

Computer scientist Alan Mislove at Northeastern University in Boston and colleagues have analyzed public tweets posted between September 2006 and August 2009 to create this "mood map" that they call the "pulse of the nation."

And by the looks of it, California and Florida are living life happily. The northeast, not so much. They also found that the country is happiest on Sunday mornings and hits a low on Thursday evenings.

Researchers filtered tweets to find ones that contained emotional words that they scored as positive or negative. For instance, "love" and "paradise" are happy words, while "rape" and "suicide" are not.

Finally, the researchers calculated the average mood score of each state and morphed the maps so that the size of each country reflected the number of Twitter users living there.

Check it out.

Green = Happy. Red = Sad.

Via