How happy are you and your neighbors?

Researchers have released details of a new U.S. study examining happiness and quality of life in each state. The study examined 1.3 million Americans to gauge personal happiness.

A study was reported on livesience.com concerning the happiness of people in each state. The study also looked at a number of objective measures such as air quality, home prices, how crowded the state is and other various factors that are known to impact quality of life. The top state might surprise you in that it is Louisiana. The caveat here is that the data was gathered pre-Katrina. Still, the group firmly stands by their research that after Louisiana everyone else is right in line. So who else was in the Top-10? 1) Louisiana 2) Hawaii 3) Florida 4) Tennessee 5) Arizona 6) Mississippi 7) Montana 8) South Carolina 9) Alabama 10) Maine Geographically the states are truly mixed and it isn't based soley on climate, although New York ranked dead last. It is important to note though that California was 46. Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England stated, "All anyone has been able to do is to report the averages state-by-state, and the problem with doing that is you're not comparing apples with apples because the people who live in New York City are nothing like the individuals living in Montana." What Oswald and Stephen Wu, an economist at Hamilton College in New York did was attempt to make a representation of America based on statistics. "We wanted to study whether people's feelings of satisfaction with their own lives are reliable, that is, whether they match up to reality - of sunshine hours, congestion, air quality, etc - in their own state," Oswald said. You can go to LiveScience for the entire list.