A study examining the behaviour of Australian Twitter users has revealed Canberra residents are the most depressed in the country.

The social media study by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and an advertising company, found Australians send about 5,000 tweets per minute.

More than half of those generated from Sydney and Melbourne, with 46 per cent of users male and 54 per cent female.

Researchers analysed a list of typical words associated with emotions, and found Canberrans are the most anxious, aggressive and sad in Australia.

That is compared to those in Western Australia who send the highest amount of positive tweets.

Dr Suresh Sood from UTS says Canberra seems to be out of sync with the other capital cities when it comes to happiness.

"Canberrans are happiest on Thursdays and Thursday evenings, they don't wait - as in most of the other cities - until Friday to be happy," he said.

"We're trying to get to the bottom of this. Whether people get happy because they see the weekend coming and so on."

Dr Sood says social media can reveal what users are really thinking and feeling.

"Essentially every set of tweets has content from which we can learn something about the psychological style of the individual who tweeted at that moment," he said.

"If we assume that the people that are tweeting are the people that they say they are, then we basically understand were they very happy at the time, were they feeling down beat etc.

"So the analysis looks at in excess of 24 million tweets across Australia over the past few months and understands the psychological state of individuals."