Muslim people feel the most satisfied with their lives because they feel more 'oneness,' or connection than people of other faiths, a new study suggests.
Measuring life satisfaction is about as close to quantifying 'happiness' as we've been able to get thus far, and a German psychologist's new study suggests that a feeling of 'oneness' predicts overall contentment.
And when the researchers divided their 67,562 survey respondents by religion, Muslims felt the greatest sense of oneness.
Research from a number of disciplines, including religion, philosophy and psychology have suggested that varying types of connectedness lead to an over-arching sense of well-being.
New research suggests that Muslim people are are most likely of all religions to feel a sense of 'oneness' and, in turn, feel greater life satisfaction
What is happiness, and how do we get it? It's one of the 'big questions' of psychology.
We don't know, we won't know and it probably wouldn't be universally applicable even if we did.
But Dr Ed Deiner, a professor emeritus of psychology the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is famous in academic circles for managing to make a scale for happiness - or the 'Satisfaction with Life Scale' (SWLS).
Dr Deiner's scale consists of five questions that are meant to surmise how subjectively satisfied someone is with their life as a whole.
Each question gets a ranking for how strongly the participant disagrees or agrees, on a scale of one to seven.
The higher you score, the more satisfied with your life you are (supposedly).
A number of studies, including a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, have suggested that people who describe themselves as 'highly religious' are more likely to say they are 'very happy' with life.
The vast majority (95 percent) of these highly happy Americans were Christians: Protestant, Catholic or Mormon.
But spirituality - regardless of affiliation with a specific religion - is also closely linked to life satisfaction, well-being and, in cancer patients, optimism.
Psychologists have landed on the idea of 'oneness' as the common thread running through spiritual people of all faiths.
The so-called 'father of psychoanalysis,' Sigmund Freud thought that all humans craved to return to the 'oneness' of being in their mother's womb, connected in every way to her.
More contemporary psychologists have also put forth oneness as a personality trait that distinguishes people who seek and make
