Chapter 1: What makes us happy according to science?
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus.
Chapter 2: What is the world's longest study into happiness?
Today on the show, we're pitting facts against finding happiness. That's right. There's claims out there that all kinds of things can make us happy, from making money, to having kids, to buying your dream home. But what actually works? What does it take to have a happy life? To find out, Harvard has been running this amazing study which has tracked hundreds of people for decades.
Chapter 3: What is the biggest finding of the Harvard happiness study?
It's actually the longest running scientific study into happiness. And as a result, we now have all of these awesome insights into how we can not only be happier, but healthier too. And so today on the show, we're chatting with the guy who has been the director of this study for more than two decades. His name is Professor Bob Waldinger.
He's also a psychiatrist and he co-wrote a book about this study. Bob is going to tell us what a lot of us get wrong in searching for the good life.
Chapter 4: How do good relationships contribute to happiness?
And ultimately, how science can help us all to be happy. Here's Bob.
Well, the biggest finding is that the people who stayed healthiest and happiest the longest were the people who were... Come on, I'm not going to give it away that easily.
You got to listen to the episode.
Science spills the beans on how to be happy just after the break.
Chapter 5: What personal experiences led the guest to become happier?
Welcome back. Today, we're talking about the world's longest-running study into happiness. It's officially called the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
Chapter 6: How does childhood adversity impact happiness later in life?
At the start of the study, pretty much everyone was a white guy. Eventually, they let in women. And a lot of their findings have been repeated by different groups all around the world.
Chapter 7: Does having children actually make people happier?
So let's jump in.
Chapter 8: How does money influence our happiness levels?
Here's Professor Bob Waldinger. Bob, you are the director of this amazing study. For those who have never heard of it, what is kind of the driving question of this study?
How do we live a good life? That's really it. And what are the conditions that predict who's going to thrive as they go through their life and who isn't? That's what we were asking.
So set the scene of how this study began. It's the 1930s. Who are scientists picking to study?
Well, they were two separate studies that didn't actually know about each other. One was a study of Harvard College undergraduate students, 19-year-olds, who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding specimens. And so they were chosen to study normal development from adolescence to young adulthood. And of course, now we You know, we realize how ridiculous that is.
If you want to study normal development, you study all white guys from Harvard? No. But the other group was also a study of normal development, but it was a study of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods and their most troubled families. So families known for domestic violence, parental illness, mental illness, known to social service agencies for so much trouble.
And the question that these researchers had was, what allows some children born into such difficult circumstances to thrive, to stay out of trouble, to do well?
So it started in the 30s and 40s. It's going all the way up to today, following the kids then of these people because none of the original participants still are living.
There were 724 original participants. Fewer than 10 are still living, and they're all over age 100.
Wow.
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