Happy? - Sometimes? Often? Rarely? Always?
Here's a chance to learn more about happiness.
Robb Rutledge, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University. He’s also the son of our classmate Dave Rutledge and his wife Dale Yee.
Robb’s lab at Yale combines computational models, neuroimaging, and data collected from thousands of people around the world playing simple smartphone games including in their newest app, Happiness Quest, to explore the links between the decisions we make and what determines our happiness.
Feelings of happiness and sadness are central to conscious experience, but we still know little about what happens in the brain when we have these feelings or how these feelings relate to the events in our lives. Notably, Robb developed a mathematical equation for happiness that explains the role that expectations have in how we feel.
Among the posts on his Psychology Today blog are intriguing topics such as “Why Learning – Not Rewards – May Be the Key to Happiness” and “Would You Be Happier if You Lowered Your Expectations?” The Lab has also published articles such as “Why Do We Make Risky Decisions?” and one with a degree of pertinence to ’73: “Do Older People Take Fewer Risks?”, which posits that as we age, the dopamine in our brain gradually declines, possibly explaining a reduction in our willingness to take risks for potential rewards.
The Rutledge lab has developed the smartphone app Happiness Quest so that anyone can contribute to its research. If you’d like to participate in Robb’s work on happiness – and have fun while doing it – check out the lab’s mobile app and play a few games https://www.happinessquest.app/
Please join us on Wednesday, April 27th at 5:00 Eastern.
Register here:
https://williams.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwsceispjooHdEmqDjEbK1yTLQ1scrspRHZ
After you register and near the date, you’ll get a Zoom link and a reminder. Robb’s also agreed to allow recording for later viewing by classmates who can’t make the session.
Thanks in advance to Robb for a talk you won’t want to miss.
Steve
hartystephen@hotmail.com