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

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 partic

SUBMITTER: Shin WG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12635377 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature