Claremont school offers happiness studies

CLAREMONT — Claremont Graduate University is offering an unusual doctoral program focusing on what makes people happy.

“Most research on human behavior has focused on what goes wrong in human affairs: aggression, mental disease, failure and so on,” said Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee), head of university’s Quality of Life Research Center.

“We don’t know enough about what makes life worth living, what gives people hope and energy and enjoyment,” he said.

This fall, the university’s School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences will offer master’s and Ph.D. programs in positive psychology.

The school describes positive psychology as a field aimed at “enhancing human strengths such as creativity, joy, enhancing flow at work, responsibility, and optimal performance and achievement.”

However, the Ph.D. program is anything but touchy-feely. It will feature hardcore studies in research and statistics./AP

The program will help build credibility for the relatively new field and help bring the field of psychology into an age-old problem, said Robert A. Emmons, a University of California, Davis, psychology professor who launched the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.

———

On the Net:

Claremont Graduate University: http://www.cgu.edu/pages/1.asp

Napa Valley Register Copyright © 2009