Happiness & Public Policy

The San Jose Mercury LA Timesreports Claremont Graduate University is offering a new psychology Ph.D. program centered on happiness studies led by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

This is no New Age enterprise. The Ph.D. program in the emerging field of positive psychology marks an advance for serious research into human happiness and related quality-of-life concerns. It is an arena drawing the attention of psychologists, as well as neuroscientists, economists and even political scientists.

Although the desire to live a better life is fundamental for ordinary folks - think pursuit of happiness - researchers long have devoted their energies elsewhere.

“Most research on human behavior has focused on what goes wrong in human affairs: aggression, mental disease, failure and so on,” said Claremont Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is a pioneer in positive psychology and a leader of the doctoral program.

Csikszentmihalyi, whose 18 books include the 1990 best seller, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” calls the study of human pathologies essential but adds, “We don’t know enough about what makes life worth living, what gives people hope and energy and enjoyment.”

He and his partner in running the program, psychologist Jeanne Nakamura, emphasize that their work is not aimed at a self-help audience.

Such studies can involve tracking hundreds of people over a week and paging them at random times to ask how
they are feeling. Are they happy? Creative? Energetic? Researchers then correlate those feelings with what the people are doing, the settings they are in and who they are with, among other things.

From Scientific American:

Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy people have a harder time focusing.

Crap! I’m a happy guy.