Work

Happier individuals generate more spontaneous thoughts about friends and value relationships over money

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Spontaneous thoughts are a window into one’s mind, as they offer rich information about ongoing psychological processes and value systems. We accessed the contents of these thoughts using a free association paradigm combined with natural language processing techniques to examine how happiness is associated with what people think about and prioritize in daily life. Our analyses revealed that participants (n = 210 from the US/UK) with higher subjective well-being, particularly those with more frequent positive affect, generated thoughts semantically more similar to ‘friend,’ but not to ‘money.’ A similar pattern was also found in an independent sample (n = 350 from South Korea), showing consistency of the findings across different cultural contexts. Notably, the semantic similarity of participants’ generated thoughts to ‘friend’ predicted the extent to which participants prioritized social relationships over monetary gains in a realistic dilemma task. By exploring individuals’ minds with a computational approach, our work elucidates how the value of social relationships is manifested in spontaneous thought contents and everyday decisions, providing insights into the sources of happiness. Using free association and natural language methods, we show that individuals with higher subjective well-being generate thoughts semantically closer to ‘friend’ but not to ‘money,’ highlighting the value of social relationships in happiness.

Source: Communications Psychology

DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00341-3