The conclusion: When they are limited to 140 characters or less, these researchers say, believers are happier than their counterparts.
Two doctoral students in social psychology and an adviser analyzed the casual language of nearly 2 million tweets from more than 16,000 active users to come up with their findings, which were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
With the help of a text analysis program, the researchers found that Christians tweet with higher frequency words reflecting positive emotions, social relationships and an intuitive style of thinking -- the sort that's gut-driven.
This isn't to say that atheists don't use these words, too, but they out-tweet Christians when it comes to analytic words and words associated with negative emotions.
Christians, they found, are more likely to use words like "love," "happy" and "great"; "family," "friend" and "team."
Atheists win when it comes to using words like "bad," "wrong," and "awful" or "think," "reason" and "question," said Ryan Ritter, one of the students behind the study.