Christians tweeters happier than atheists but less analytical?

This piece of research Christians tweet more happily, less analytically than atheists is in line with a broader body of data emerging around the issue of happiness, the guts of it is:

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.

 So the corpus is reasonably big. The weak spot would be whether the words chosen are sufficiently contextualised to give a fairly stable indicator of what is being looked for -irony, sarcasm and unusual grammar could all have an effect, and this article doesn't let us peek at that fine-grained analysis. That said, the fact that this lines up with wider findings probably means that its a fairly safe bet. It lines up in that 'religious' people tend to have better social connections and more positive attitudes towards life than those who didn't score highly as 'religious'.

Of course, the 'less analytical' thing is intriguing and deserve more investigation. I suspect that there are fairly culturally-relative drivers in this case in that my hypothesis that this might actually be different in societies where atheism is more mainstream (China?) because felt-minorities need to make more intellectual effort to justify their dissenting position. Also I think that the religious cultures of Christianity in the west tends to be somewhat anti-intellectual and semi-consciously emotive (actually a contrast to the Evangelicalism of my youth which may well have shown up more evaluative and analytical language had there been tweeting then). So, as the article points out, 'the authors caution that the results are correlational and "this does not mean atheists are unhappy overall or doomed to be miserable. If religion improves happiness indirectly through other factors, those benefits could also be found outside religious groups." '
of course, the obverse needs to be noted that analytical thinking could also be found outside of atheist groups, it may for various reasons simply not show up in tweets. I'm proposing that there are cultural reasons for this, including that the use of tweets for pro-sociality would prime, in an affective sub-culture, less use of analytical language. I also suspect that Christian intellectuals are less likely to be using twitter.

So, while these are intriguing results, more contextual analysis may be needed of an anthropological and socio-linguistic sort.