Smile study says Kelowna among happiest cities in Canada

"A SMALL GRIN DOESN'T SCORE AS HIGHLY AS A BROAD SMILE."

KELOWNA – If you judge a city’s happiness based on the number of Instagram photos featuring smiling subjects, then a recently released app has some good news for residents of Kelowna.

Jetpac City Guides is a Canadian company that conducted a study revealing, based on an unusual method of quantifying ‘happiness’, that Kelowna ranked #8 on the list of Canada’s happiest cities.

By analyzing facial expressions in millions of publicly shared Instagram photos, Jetpac ranked cities across Canada based on prevalence and intensity of the smiles.

According to the website, “Smiles on the faces of millions of people in millions of photos are the most direct measure we have of happiness. A small grin doesn’t score as highly as a broad smile. Smiling for the camera is a cultural habit that tends to be the same around a country, so the relative happiness of a city rises above any posed smiles.”

Jetpac has released an iPhone app that lets users view the results of the study as well as shows which specific locations within the city elicit the largest smiles.

Kelowna received a ‘smile score’ of 29.4, beating other B.C. cities Vancouver and Victoria, which scored 20.2 and 26.8 respectively.

The ‘happiest’ city, Kingston, Ontario, received a smile score of 40.2.

The 25 happiest Canadian cities, according to Jetpac City Guides:

1. Kingston
2. Regina
3. Quebec City
4. Gatineau
5. Saskatoon
6. London
7. Waterloo-Kitchener
8. Kelowna
9. Edmonton
10. Banff
11. Hamilton
12. Surrey
13. Calgary
14. Winnipeg
15. Burlington
16. Victoria
17. Halifax
18. Ottawa
19. Mont-Tremblant
20. Niagara Falls
21. Whistler
22. Montreal
23. Toronto
24. Vancouver
25. Niagara-on-the-Lake

A tongue-in-cheek video created by Jetpac illustrating the "discovery" of the correlation between Instagram pics and happiness.

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To contact the reporter for this story, email Adam Proskiw at aproskiw@infotelnews.ca, call (250) 718-0428 or tweet @AdamProskiw.