Instagram can tell you what’s new, what’s cool, and what’s for dinner. But can you use it to find happiness? The data analysts at HouseFresh reckon so, and they processed thousands of Instagram selfies to find the happiest places in the U.S. – and those places where intense smiles are more common than genuine joy.
To calculate the happiest cities and states in the U.S., HouseFresh used Microsoft Azure’s Face API. This facial recognition tool places numerical estimates on emotions based on characteristics and expressions.
They analyzed images from each state’s Instagram page, as well as from the top 100 U.S. cities by population. To work out the happiest cities and states, they used the FaceAPI happiness score, averaging all the scores for the faces detected by FaceAPI in each location.
For the smiliest cities and states, they considered that a face has a smile if its smile score was greater than 0.75. The locations were ranked by the percentage of people smiling.
Check out the full ranking at: https://housefresh.com/the-happiest-cities-and-states-in-the-united-states/
