I'm June Gruber, an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, and director of the Mental Health Expert series. We're here today with Dr. Dacher Keltner, a professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, to talk with him about his really groundbreaking work on the science of happiness. Thanks for being with us today Dacher. It's always good to talk to you June. I was wondering if you could start by telling us a bit about the work you do, connecting science with wellness and mental health. Yeah. I mean, it's multifaceted. Within the lab, what my focus has been with my students including you, is we have this really remarkable array of positive emotions that I believe that evolution is built into our minds and our social interactions. Emotions like gratitude, and awe, and compassion, and contentment, and laughter, and love. Those have very direct influences upon patterns of neurophysiology like immune response, vagal tone and the like that then influence how our social lives go and how our well-being goes. In the last 20 years, our lab has really focused on how does awe help veterans and people who are at risk, youth. How does the practice of gratitude help to help their relationship? How does getting outdoors, we're about to publish a paper and looking for awe help people who are over the age of 75, who really are vulnerable to anxiety and depression, attenuate those quality. Our focus is on these amazing positive emotions that bring us delight in relationships and a healthy mind. How did you get started doing this work on? I mean, just as you said, these amazing positive emotions. I mean, your work is just so exciting, so inspiring and really fresh. How did you start doing it? Thank you for asking that and it's so good for all researchers out there to be thinking like, why am I doing this? The deep answer is my parents, I was raised by an artist and a literature professor who was my mom, who really both were romantics and love the passions, joy, ecstasy, awe, compassion. Then scientifically, it actually began when I was a postdoc with Paul Ekman and I learned the Facial Action Coding System and we started to look at the human face and there was this narrow focus on anger, disgust, fear, surprise, sadness and then something called happiness, which I didn't even think it's an emotion. As I learned this tool, and I was gathering data and looking at in my social life, I would see people blush, and I would see them get embarrassed, and I'd see them laugh, and I'd see them pucker their lips when they're flirting. These are all facial muscle movements that we've subsequently mapped to distinct positive emotions. That really became this portal into the question that Darwin asked was like, why do we have these emotions? Now, there are really robust data showing review by Lani Shiota and Allan Cowen, probably 8-10 distinct positive states that really are important to our lives that we need to include in the conversation about mental health. Yeah. As you're saying just part of our lived experience as human beings and stuff. I mean, fundamentally, our lab's been working on awe. It's so interesting, like awe. I hate how I pronounce it, awe. Whenever I talk to British people they're like, so you study awe and I'm like, yeah, I study awe and they're like oh. But, yeah, awe is about your lived experience as a human in the broad context of your lives and what better thing to study. Yeah. In the natural world too enjoying doing the work you're doing getting outside and just appreciating the planet we're on. I'd love to hear some of the Chronicles along the way over your career, both the frustrations and failures, but the things that you've really savored and held onto that have been special moments in your career. For those people who are really going to dig into the career like you and I are, of peer review science, it's just a long slog. It's funny when outsiders see the let reviews we get, a dozen single-spaced pages just beating you up with everything that you say and do just to try to publish a paper. It's humbling. I wouldn't call it frustrating but opening the field's size to all these other emotions, which now there's a lot of interest in and a lot of movement and emerging science. That's been hard. Along the way, the field will guide you to give up on ideas. Early in my career, I did work on personality and emotion. It isn't my strong suit and I never could publish the findings that seemed eminently publishable. I was like, wow, I spent hundreds of hours coding faces and so forth. The delights of our career are extraordinary. For me, it's using the science of emotion to help with criminal justice reform. I was involved in a case against solitary confinement, I'm working with people who have been incarcerated, adapting to their lives. It was partnering with Sierra Club on all and getting veterans and high school students enrichment and Oakland out to enjoy the benefits of nature, like being part of inside out. The career gets you to these wonderful conversations. I think you've had Steve Hinshaw on the program. Steve's probably about ten years older than me and he just won this award and I asked him, will savor it? He's like I've just scratched the surface. That's how I feel. I feel like we still got to figure that out. Our labs working on music and art right now and that's such a mystery. It's an amazing career. I feel very lucky. I love the beautiful mysteries that you're saying with Steve's example and your own experiences, they don't end. But that's a great thing. Yeah. I think many of us, including you, will be on our death bed like, I still got one more study to do. That's how it is. Thinking about till the very end I suppose as you think about the future, what do you think are the most important next steps in the field? One big one is that I've been partially involved in working with Pinterest and Apple so can you really deliver well-being technologically? I'm actually skeptical and I suspect you would be too. If well-being is really social and then moving your body out in the world to find delight, can we do it technologically? I don't know. For me, having been located in the science of emotion for 25-30 years, I think the next waves of universality are going to be really interesting. We just published a paper on how in the ancient Mesoamerican art that predates contact with westerners, they're portraying faces in context just like we would. Wow. I think they're going to be new big data computational approaches that will be very exciting for our field. For me, one of the big mysteries is the aesthetic realm, music and visual art, and the design of buildings, and how this all makes us feel things. I think interestingly, I think psychologists have a lot to say in that realm, beyond philosophy and specialists in the field. I could go on, there's still a lot of work to do. I love the point you made at the end about art and wellness because art is central part of our lives as children, and then somewhere it disappears along the way for so many people. Music. Our visual art in particularly. We draw as kids and you have young kids, and then it just stops. I would add dance too, where you are starting to do a little bit of a research on dance. You ask people, you go to a wedding, and you're dancing with 80-year-olds and two-year-olds, and you come out of there like, ''I haven't felt this good in 22 years.'' Why aren't we studying that? Why aren't we promoting that? Art and music, they are well-being interventions, they're deep traditions, and they should be a bigger part of our work. You need to understand them better just as you're saying. The last question I have for you, which is my favorite because I feel you're always so good at career and life advice. What advice would you have for other people, many people watching this interview today who are interested in the field? It's so interesting I was thinking about this. When you're at my stage of the career you're like what am I doing? What happened? I think that the first thing is, I would say, and I got really guided into this by Lee Ross, who is my advisor at Stanford in grad school and Phoebe Ellsworth [inaudible] just follow, go after things you don't know, a mystery. Science is really animated by mystery. When Darwin rode around the world, he just didn't know what all these observations were amounting to. When Von Humboldt started drawing ecosystems, he didn't know either. I think there's a tendency to like, I want to go for something that's certain, and I would go after what you don't know. I always tell my students go after unexplained variance. If you know that social class has influences on things, which has profound influences on it, try to figure out other influences that you could study. It's interesting I've been doing some research on tears and goosebumps, and I think they're really interesting autonomic physiological responses that are distinct, that tell you what you're doing right now really is what you care about most. If you're tearing up, or if you get a little chill, and you got to do that. If you're lucky enough, like you and I are like, I got a job that pays the bills, most my bills, man, then do something that really moves you. Thank you. That's beautiful advice and really a good advice too. It's what life's for. I know it's [inaudible] now. Right now, Black Lives Matter, climate crisis, fires in California where I live. We got to do what matters and we have a lot to offer. Well, thanks for speaking today Docker. It's always good to see you June. All right. Have a good rest of your day. You too. Bye. Bye.
