What makes a person happy? The most common answers would be family, relationships, meaningful work, money, intelligence and attractiveness, among others.

Whatever may bring you happiness, go for it and live a longer life.

A new study by a research team from University College, London, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found out that the happier a person is, the longer he will live.

The researchers studied 3,800 people from ages 52 to 79 and found that those who had the highest rating of happiness were significantly less likely to die in the succeeding five years.

The team took into account factors such as age, disease and lifestyle and found that the happiest group had a 35 percent lower risk of death than the least happy.

"The happiness could be a marker of some other aspect of people's lives which is particularly important for health," said Professor Andrew Steptoe, who led the study.

"For example, happiness is quite strongly linked to good social relationships, and maybe it is things like that that are accounting for the link between happiness and health," he said.

To measure happiness, participants answered questions about themselves in several categories on a scale from one to five.

"On a five-point scale you could feel four points happy and two points worried at the same time. It is not a single dimension you are looking at; it is much more complicated than that," Steptoe said in a statement.

Data showed that five years on from the assessment, just 3.6 percent of the happiest participants had died, while about 4.6 percent of those who were averagely happy passed away. Meanwhile, around 7.3 percent of the group with the lowest positive affect died during the same time.

Thus, the researchers concluded after accounting for other medical factors that the happiest people were more than a third less likely to die.