Psychology has made great strides in understanding mental illness, but how much has it learned about mental health? When people want to reflect upon the good life and how to live it, they turn to philosophers and novelists, not psychologists. The emerging field of positive psychology aims to redress this imbalance. In Flourishing, distinguished scholars apply scientific analyses to study the good life, expanding the scope of social and psychological research to include happiness, well-being, courage, citizenship, play, and the satisfactions of healthy work and healthy relationships. Their findings reveal that a sense of meaning and a feeling of richness emerge in life as people immerse themselves in activities, relationships, and the pursuit of intrinsically satisfying goals like overcoming adversity or serving one's community through volunteering. This provocative book will further define this evolving field.
A strange path led me to write the Happiness Hypothesis. It all started with an existential crisis in high school -- after reading "Waiting for Godot" I became convinced there was no meaning to life. So I majored in philosophy in college, which was of little help. Then I went to graduate school in psychology, where I began to study morality and culture. Then I did post-doctoral research in anthropology (including 3 months in India), then a year of research in health psychology. It felt like meandering at the time, but every period of these travels contributed many ideas to The Happiness Hypothesis, which ends with an answer to the question: What is the meaning of life?
I'm now an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia -- an idyllic university founded by Thomas Jefferson. My next projects will involve taking the insights about balance and virtue that I came to while writing the Happiness Hypothesis, and applying them to the American culture wars. I am conducting research that may help liberals and conservatives to understand each other -- and why both sides are necessary for the health of our democracy.
