What is it about Pennsylvania...

[P_Bustleton]

Hey Lyz and Angel, I checked it out on Google Labs...

Check out the concentration of searches for the terms tickling, tickle torture, tickle fetish, tickling torture, and tickling fetish in the attached pdfs: for every single term PA ranks #1 for searches from 2004 to today, with other upper-Midwest and Northeastern states close behind.

It's official: PA is the capitol of tickling! New Mexico didn't make the top 10 for any of them 🙁

This is remarkable. I was born in PA and have lived in the top four states for "tickling."

I don't think I'm responsible for all the searching. 😉

It's probably a cultural thing--more kids grow up with tickling as an acceptable form of play in the Mid-Atlantic states.

I don't think it's "something in the water" - i.e., an environmental factor. If it were, the same factor would probably affect something like depression rates (making them higher or lower). Depression rates in the top "tickling" states are all over the place. Of course (for you scientists out there) I haven't normalized the tickling data and run a regression, but it's pretty unlikely there's a correlation.