Robb Rutledge
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry
Yale University
The happiness of individuals is an important metric for societies, but we know relatively little about how daily life events are aggregated into subjective feelings. We show that happiness depends on the history of expectations and prediction errors resulting from those expectations, a result we have now replicated in thousands of individuals using smartphone-based data collection (https://happinessquest.app). Using fMRI, we show how happiness relates to neural activity and to the neuromodulator dopamine. We apply this computational framework to a range of problems including how happiness depends on intrinsic reward and how it changes during conversations with artificial intelligence. Using computational models for decision making and reinforcement learning, we show how feelings vary across individuals during multiple tasks and in relation to major depression.
View a recording of this session here.