Spending time with friends may promote greater happiness than spending time with family, at least according to a recent study. 

For the study, researchers used an app called the Mappiness app to determine how much happier people were when they were with their friends, parents, and children.

The app sent alerts asking people how happy they felt — on an 11-point scale from “not at all” to “extremely” — throughout the day. By analyzing over 3 million submissions from more than 50,000 volunteers, the researchers discovered that people experienced, on average, an 8% increase in happiness when they were with friends, compared with a 1.4% increase with parents, and just a 0.7% increase when they were with their children.