Welcome to the Science of Happiness.
I'm Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley and the founding director of
the Greater Good Science Center here at UC Berkeley.
And I'm Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the science director at the Greater Good Science Center.
I first heard about the Greater Good when I was a grad student at UC Berkeley and I
was studying the way that negative emotions effect the thinking and decision making and
after lots of well-earned contempt from my research subjects, who had to solve difficult
puzzles while I flashed disturbing pictures at them, I welcomed the opportunity to shift
my focus and do post-doctoral research on pro-social states like love of humanity and
compassion, and that, with a few steps in-between, leads me here.
On that note, I'd like to add that I don't consider myself the world's happiest person,
or an exemplar of perfect happiness.
I can be grumpy, again, which is one of the reasons I feel it's such a privilege to do
this course with you.
I learn each day new things from thinking about how this science can be taught and trying
he things that I am suggesting and bringing it into my day-to-day life.
I was born in Mexico and raised in California by my mom who's a literature professor and
my dad who's an artist, and like Em, happiness was really hard won for me.
It was I was an anxious child and have, over time, really learned the merits of this science.
I got my Ph.D. at Stanford University and then did a post-doc with Paul Ekman at UC
San Francisco and for the past twenty years here [at] my lab at Berkeley I've been studying
things like awe and beauty, forgiveness, compassion, and cooperation.
Ten years ago I began teaching this class on happiness here at UC Berkeley, and it's
really a privilege to be able to bring this together and teach it to such a large audience.
You know, for me, learning about things like gratitude and compassion, and learning how
to forgive really have been critical to how I relate to my kids, and my wife, and my work
colleagues, and people in my community, so, I hope you find the same relevance of this
material as I have.
So all this information that we're sharing with you is partly to highlight two key lessons
from the science that we want to mention up front.
Number one is that when we talk about happiness in this course, we're not talking about always
feeling pleasure or joy.
From our view, happiness is much more nuanced and complex than that.
So please don't feel like you need to check your skepticism or your negative feelings
at the door.
So the second big lesson is that happiness really takes work, and I really hope that
you work as hard at happiness as you do at cooking a good meal or an exercise regime.
You know, some of us are born with the right genetic makeup and happiness comes easy, but
for most of us, we really need tools and practices to pursue happiness, and we really hope you
will find lessons for you in this pursuit of happiness in this class.
While we are going to delve deeply into the scientific research on happiness and consider
what happiness is and where it comes from and why it matters, we're also going to emphasize
the practical side of things.
So how can we apply the insights from this science to our day-to-day lives, and in doing
this, we'll be exploring specific activities each week that been shown, that have been
tested by research, and that have been linked to greater happiness and well being.
So, the class you're going to take, the Science of Happiness, one of the really exciting things
is that it spans all kinds of different disciplines.
Disciplines like psychology and neuroscience and evolutionary biology, generated, really,
in the labs by researchers from around the world.
The Greater Good Science Center has really been at the forefront of this movement of
the science of happiness for twelve years and we have been covering all of the discoveries
related to topics like altruism and empathy, and compassion, mindfulness and gratitude
and, what we've done, is we've brought these lessons together in this course, the Science
of Happiness, to share with you what we've learned.
So in the next few videos, we're going to explain in more detail the outline of the
course, the different topics that we'll cover each week, the different elements of the course
and the videos, the readings, the happiness practices.
You can find those details on the course info page also and in the course syllabus.
So let's get started with the Science of Happiness!