So, a group of researchers from Northeastern University teamed up with their colleagues from Harvard and decided to analyze the mood of America — not captured at any one time, but over the course of an average day. To do that, they looked at 300 million tweets sent out over the course of three years, from September 2006 to August 2009. They gauged the mood of Twitter users over every hour of the day, determining when people were the happiest, when they were angriest, and so on. Then, they mapped those moods, morphing the size of each state to reflect the volume of tweets per state. Like so:

Notice something interesting? While many states shift from red to green and back again (red being angry and green, happy), Louisiana is pretty much one Roma tomato, with flickers of “meh” thrown in for effect. Crankypants.

Of course, the three years in question weren’t the best for us, and we did (and do) have a lot to complain about. But maybe we’re not as happy-go-lucky as we (and the rest of the world) would like to believe.

[via Towleroad]