Christians tweet more happily, less analytically than atheists

University of Illinois psychology professor Jesse Preston, left, graduate student Ryan Ritter and graduate student Ivan Hernandez (not pictured) investigated the social, emotional and analytical content of the tweets of more than 16,000 Christian and atheist followers on Twitter. CHAMPAIGN, Ill. A computer analysis of nearly 2 million text messages (tweets) on the online social network Twitter found that Christians use more positive words, fewer negative words and engage in less analytical thinking than atheists. Christians also were more likely than atheists to tweet about their social relationships, the researchers found. The findings are reported in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science. "Whether religious people experience more or less happiness is an important question in itself," the authors of the new analysis wrote. "But to truly understand how religion and happiness are related we must also understand why the two may be related." To identify Christian and atheist Twitter users, the researchers studied the tweets of more than 16,000 followers of a few prominent Christian and atheist personalities on Twitter.