by nate on Friday, December 18th, 2009 | Places to Visit, Tips, Travel

Ever wonder where you would want to stay in the United States to make yourself content with peace and happiness?

Florida and two other sunshine states made it to the Top 5, while Minnesota doesn’t show up until number 26 on the list of happiest states. In addition to rating the smile factor of U.S. states, the research also proved for the first time that a person’s self-reported happiness matches up with objective measures of well-being.

“When human beings give you an answer on a numerical scale about how satisfied they are with their lives, it is best to pay attention. Their answers are reliable,”

- Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England.

He added, “This suggests that life-satisfaction survey data might be very useful for governments to use in the design of economic and social policies.”

The happy-states list, however, doesn’t match up with a similar ranking reported last month, which found that the most tolerant and wealthiest states were, on average, the happiest. Oswald says this past is based on raw averages of people’s happiness in a state, and so doesn’t provide meaningful results.

According to the research, below are the happiest states:

1. Louisiana
2. Hawaii
3. Florida
4. Tennessee
5. Arizona
6. Mississippi
7. Montana
8. South Carolina
9. Alabama
10. Maine

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Tags: happiest state, happy state, Hawaii is the happiest states, human and happiness, location and happiness, Louisiana, Research, where is the happiest population