We know that money doesn’t buy happiness. Yet, sometimes shopping does make people feel better; or at least they think it does. So here’s the question, can buying something in particular make you happier than something else?

A study published last year in Psychological Science tried this experiment:

They gave vouchers to extraverts and introverts to either buy a drink or a book. Along the way, participants repeatedly completed a measure of positive and negative mood so that the researchers could study deviations from the mood baseline. The results showed that introverts who had bought books enjoyed mood lifts.

Easy. Feeling down? Go to the bookstore.