Splash Biography

For much of its relatively short history, the psychological sciences have been heavily focused on what is wrong with people, from Sigmund Freud’s ideas of mental disorders to Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies. Then emerged positive psychology, which began to use the scientific method to systematically study the “well-lived life” and how people can use this understanding to achieve happiness and satisfaction. Now, positive psychology is a thriving and exciting new branch of psychology with almost immediate implications for how we live, act, and think. As a primer for the new field, this course will explore how scientists define and study happiness and satisfaction, some of the not-so-surprising and surprising findings so far, and how we can incorporate some of these ideas and theories into our own lives.