Principles of Happiness

Course Director: Micael Dahlen

Grounded in research on happiness and wellbeing, the course aims to give you opportunity and ability to reflect on and experience how you can make life better for yourself and for others, both in the short term and in the long term. It provides tools to increase your agency in life, and really make it y-o-u-r life. Leverage everyday actions to (hopefully) make big impact. It also nurtures your curiosity to keep learning and exploring routes in your future career and life situations. And, hopefully, it can make your life a little bit better, right now (we’re certainly gonna give it a try!)

Format

We will meet in lectures, where I feed in research and findings, and seminars, where we discuss and think out loud together. We all learn more together from shifting each other’s perspectives, teasing each other’s creativity and training each other’s empathy.

Mini challenges

Life is live. To learn about life, and make life better, we need to go live. Try and see what happens, train and become better. I will give you weekly mini challenges to take on.

Diary

Life is lived everyday. The word diary literally means “daily allowance” (from the Latin “diarium”), and I want you to record your daily allowance of happiness and wellbeing. How did you feel, and why? What did you learn? Did you apply or test any idea from today’s course work? Reflect on your experiences, the world around you, and train your awareness of the opportunities to live a better life everyday.

Home exam

There will be a home exam, which gives you opportunity to reflect on and synthesize the concepts and the literature from the different themes, to make them your own and form your personal understanding of happiness and wellbeing. It also gives you opportunity to think and put yourself into different scenarios and apply insights and what you have learned, which will hopefully be useful in the future.

Course administrator: Karl.Strelis@hhs.se, alexandra.svahn.alberts@hhs.se

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• Foster reflection, awareness and a deeper understanding of what constitutes happiness and wellbeing, and how it relates to living a better life. This includes shifting perspectives of time, ourselves, and the world around us.
• Provide insight into the latest research and findings on happiness and wellbeing from different disciplines, and enable a fact-based understanding of the concepts.
• Stir curiosity to learn more about and explore new ways of enhancing one’s own and others’ happiness and wellbeing.
• Provide and have students try tools to make better life decisions under different circumstances, in the short- end the long-term.
• Engage in happiness and wellbeing exercises, tests and interventions.
• Make students' lives (as a student, future professional, and person) a bit better, literally.

General entry requirements.

Happiness paradox

• Dahlen, M. (2022), Happiness Made Easy. The Science-Based Steps to Feel Just a Bit Better. Volante.
• Diener, E., Lucas, R. E., & Oishi, S. (2018). Advances and open questions in the science of subjective well-being. Collabra: Psychology, 4(1).
• Etkin, J. (2016). The hidden cost of personal quantification. Journal of consumer research, 42(6), 967-984.
• Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological bulletin, 131(6), 803.
• Mauss, I. B., Tamir, M., Anderson, C. L., & Savino, N. S. (2011). Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Emotion, 11(4), 807.
• Oishi, S., Choi, H., Koo, M., Galinha, I., Ishii, K., Komiya, A., … & Besser, L. L. (2020). Happiness, meaning, and psychological richness. Affective Science, 1(2), 107-115.

Time:

• Bryant, F. B., Smart, C. M., & King, S. P. (2005). Using the past to enhance the present: Boosting happiness through positive reminiscence. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6(3), 227-260.
• Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of personality and social psychology, 36(8), 917.
• Diener, E., Sandvik, E., & Pavot, W. (2009). Happiness is the frequency, not the intensity, of positive versus negative affect. In Assessing well-being (pp. 213-231). Springer, Dordrecht.
• Jose, P. E., Lim, B. T., & Bryant, F. B. (2012). Does savoring increase happiness? A daily diary study. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(3), 176-187.
• Quoidbach, J., Wood, A. M., & Hansenne, M. (2009). Back to the future: The effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(5), 349-355.
• Whillans, A., Macchia, L., & Dunn, E. (2019). Valuing time over money predicts happiness after a major life transition: A preregistered longitudinal study of graduating students. Science advances, 5(9), eaax2615.

Better together

• Aknin, L. B., Dunn, E. W., & Norton, M. I. (2012). Happiness runs in a circular motion: Evidence for a positive feedback loop between prosocial spending and happiness. Journal of Happiness Studies, 13(2), 347-355.
• Boothby, E. J., Clark, M. S., & Bargh, J. A. (2014). Shared experiences are amplified. Psychological science, 25(12), 2209-2216.
• Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2013). Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behavior. Statistics in medicine, 32(4), 556-577.
• Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980-1999.
• Heyman, J., & Ariely, D. (2004). Effort for payment: A tale of two markets. Psychological science, 15(11), 787-793.
• Nelson, S. K., Layous, K., Cole, S. W., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2016). Do unto others or treat yourself? The effects of prosocial and self-focused behavior on psychological flourishing. Emotion, 16(6), 850.

Fear

• Dahlen, M. (2022), What's the Point? How to Find Meaning in Your Life, Volante.
• Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 129(4), 790.
• Taubman-Ben-Ari, O. (2011). Is the meaning of life also the meaning of death? A terror management perspective reply. Journal of happiness studies, 12(3), 385-399.

The only grade granted is Pass

Home exam.

Will be posted at the end of the lecture series. Reflections on the themes of the course, based on lectures, literature, and experiences.

All parts of the home exam must be completed sufficiently to pass the course.

Find the course schedule in TimeEdit

Have you been granted educational support because of a documented disability? If so, please contact the course director as soon as possible so that adequate accommodations can be made.

Contact specialneeds@hhs.se if you have questions about being granted educational support or need a copy of your educational support certificate.

For more information, visit the Specific Educational Needs page on the Student Hub (login required).