How the science of happiness is helping student mental health

written by 박문영

Today I will introduce about Psychology,and the topic is “How the science of happiness is helping student mental health”.Then I will talk about Bruce Hood, he is a Professor of Developmental Psychology and Society at the University of Bristol. His first degree was in psychology when he didnt even know what psychology was. He became fascinated and fell in love with it, so he decided to train as a psychologist.

As his undergraduate project, he had done work on babies and was fascinated by the developing mind and how children grow into adults. He was fortunate to get a position at Cambridge working with a team, looking at visual development. Their approach was from a physiological point of view, which is the neuroscience aspect of his training. He studied the development of the eye movement system in very young babies.

Another neurotransmitter commonly discussed whenever you hear about happiness is dopamine, a very common neurotransmitter spread throughout the brain, but its taken on this role as the pleasure chemical. Dopamine is part of the reward system. It is certainly involved in those positive experiences, but the research suggests its more to do with wanting than liking. You can distinguish between those two types of behavior.

You can want something and not necessarily like it. Addiction is a classic example, where addicts will pursue or want something and not necessarily get the high they anticipate. So wanting and liking in the brain are different systems.

Its not the prevalence of a particular neurotransmitter or drug; rather, its how they operate on the different systems, which better explains how pleasure and happiness work. Take opioids, for example. There are centers deep in the brain that we know that various recreational drugs act upon, but you only have to move a millimeter within the brain, and the effect of that drug is completely different.