Are You Happy? Happiness Study Shows South Carolinians Aren't So Happy

By Lindsay Street

The S.C. state slogan may need some reworking. Those smiling faces of "Beautiful Places, Smiling Faces" might actually be grimacing. 

According to a new study based on social media posts, South Carolina isn't the happiest state in the Unites States. In fact, it's not even close. The state ranks less than a 6 out of 10 for happiness. The national average is 7.5.

The Huffington Post reported:

"(The study was) published earlier this year in PLoS ONE by researchers at the University of Vermont. The team scored more than 10,000 words on a positive-negative scale and measured their frequency in millions of tweets across the country, deliberately ignoring context to eliminate experimental bias. What emerged was significant regional variation in happiness by this calculation, which correlates with other lifestyle measures such as gun violence, obesity and Gallup's traditional wellbeing survey. A sadness belt across the South includes states that have high levels of poverty and the shortest life expectancies."

This is one of many studies predicting behavior by geography.Earlier this year, a racism hotspot map based on Twitter was released. 

So who's happiest? Hawaii and Maine. How's that for contrasting weather?

The least happy states are Louisiana and Mississippi. 

Are you happy? Tell us in the comments!