-They told me that they couldn't reveal much
about the experiment, but they would be giving me bubble wrap.
-Today, we are filming the second episode
of our new Web series, "The Science of Happiness."
"The Science of Happiness" is the brainchild
of Matt Pittman and Mike Bernstein,
and it's a Web series
that's looking into the recently emerging field
of positive psychology.
-We knew with the first episode that we were capable
of doing something emotional and personal,
and here, we're doing something
a little bit more investigative and comedic.
-This one is a little bit more based in research
and more of, like, a human-nature aspect of it,
so we're really just putting these people to the test.
-We got a lot of comments on YouTube about this, saying,
"How can you measure happiness?"
It's a survey that's been basically standardized
that we hand out to subjects, and they fill it out,
and we can, based on their answers,
put a quantifiable number on how happy they're feeling,
you know, as some sort of percentage,
or it's a total overall score.
And so from there, we can calculate changes
in percentage to their happiness.
BERNSTEIN: Today, we're actually looking
more into how happiness manifests itself
in different ways.
We're really trying to test the potential of the topics
that we can explore with this show,
and we were reading through Scientific American Mind
and found this study about cute aggression,
which is a term that was recently coined
by a group of grad-student researchers at Yale.
And they found out that if you're overwhelmed
with a sense of happiness or giddiness,
your body and your brain
looks for some way to quickly and efficiently exert that.
And the fastest way your body can come up with is aggression.
That's why you hear about some --
when you see a cute animal,
you have the desire to, like, squeeze it.
[ Banging noise ]
We don't think about why we do that, and that's --
I think that's sort of the beauty of the show
is delving into things that we just do,
but don't think about from a scientific standpoint.
-Well, since I had seen the first episode,
I just thought they were gonna ask me questions
about, like, what made me happy
and who's influenced me and that kind of thing.
I had no idea I was gonna be watching
a slide show of animals and popping things.
-I definitely am in love with dogs,
so when I saw that, it made me pop the bubble wrap a lot.
But, then, I saw things like lions and cats
and cute, little, you know, rats,
and I'm like, "Oh, my God."
Like, "They're really trying to get the waterworks out of me."
-I'm really happy about today,
just the whole show, the whole process.
Everybody here is really committed
and really excited to be here.
The rest of this season,
we're gonna do, you know, of course, different studies.
We're gonna do a few more in the lab,
but Mike and I are thinking
that we're also gonna go out on the street
and do some outside of the Happiness Lab,
which could bring a different element to the show
and, you know, go out into the real world
and see where we can find happiness on an everyday basis,
which will be really cool.
-I think happiness is something we're all searching for,
and now that science is getting a hand into the game,
it's something that we can actually learn from
and take real, actionable steps to improve our day-to-day lives.
I think this is studies that are well worth doing.
SoulPancake!
Subscribe!