A new research has found that a large part of our collective happiness depends on our relationships with other people rather than our materialistic needs.
For the study, which was conducted at the Sahlgrenska Academy and Lund University, news articles published online by Swedish dailies during 2010 were analyzed.
By analyzing which words most often occurred in the same articles as the Swedish word for happiness, the researchers could pinpoint our collective happiness.
Danilo Garcia, researcher in psychology at the Sahlgrenska Academy's Centre for Ethics, Law and Mental Health, said that relationships are most important, not material things, and this is in line with other findings in happiness research.
The article analysis, which embraces more than one and a half million words, shows that words like "Prince Daniel", "Zlatan", "grandmother" and personal pronouns (such as you/me, us/them) often appear with the Swedish word for happiness.
On the other hand, words like "iPhone", "millions" and "Google" almost never appear with the word for happiness.
"This doesn't mean that material things make you unhappy, just that they don't seem to come up in the same context as the word for happiness," Garcia added.
The study is published in the scientific periodical Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
