How do feelings, such as happiness and sadness, relate to events in our lives and decisions we make? This is the question cognitive neuroscientist and psychology professor Robb Rutledge has spent his career pondering.
Rutledge’s Ph.D., for instance, at New York University, studied the relationship between decision making and emotion, combining computational models with neuroimaging, pharmacology and smartphone-based data collection. Data was collected from hundreds of thousands of people around the world who played games on an app.
Rutledge’s initial work led to the development of The The Happiness Project, which gleans information on happiness from willing participants. The project’s first app, The Great Brain Experiment, was downloaded by over 100,000 people. The Happiness Project’s groundbreaking research found that our happiness does not depend on how well things are going, but whether they are going better than expected recently. The project’s equation helps predict how people will say they feel before they are even asked.
The Happiness Project has since published several papers which detail how happiness relates to depression, to learning, and to social inequality. Further projects will explore how happiness relates to music and language, among other topics.
In addition to his work on the Happiness Project, Rutledge is an assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale University and a member of its Wu Tsai Institute, which seeks to understand human cognition. Prior to moving to Yale, he was a Group Leader at the Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research at University College London.
