New Yorkers should brace themselves for the results: From a survey of more than 127,000 adults, the study authors found that citizens of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic are, on average, more anxious in their romantic relationships than West Coast dwellers.
Utah, meanwhile, has one of the least anxious and most relationship-inclined populaces in the country, despite a trend in other mountain states to be less interested than average in forming romantic relationships.
“We have these stereotypes about places, and it turns out that a lot of those are confirmed,” says lead author William Chopik, a psychologist at Michigan State University.
To a certain extent, other studies of character variations among states support this idea. Research has shown that Northeasterners and Southeasterners tend to be more neurotic than Westerners, for example, while people in the Southeast, Midwest, and Utah tend to be more agreeable than other Americans. (New York ranks as one of the most neurotic and least agreeable states.) Openness to new experiences, on the other hand, hopscotches across the country — New York, Colorado, Nevada, and all of the states along the West Coast rank highly in this quality.
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