positive psychology and the study of happiness

There is something quite marvelous and magical about throwing a few words into a search engine, getting back some hits, and then finding out a few clicks later that the thing that you have been interested in for a long time is being studied not 500 feet from where you work and recognizing a face from the group picture as someone you talked to yesterday.  (Ah, a little bit more digging shows that the project is moving to North Carolina from Michigan, but still.)

The particular area of interest is positive psychology - the study of happiness - and the positive benefits of emotions like joy, interest, contentment, love, pride, elevation, and gratitude.  So much psychology focuses narrowly on pathology that it's nice in so many ways to see a focus on what's good.

Here's a piece of an interview with Barbara Fredrickson on "Why it's good to feel good" .

S&S: You have hypothesized that from an evolutionary standpoint, positive emotions enabled us to thrive by broadening our thinking, allowing us to build resources, and enabling us to reach innovative solutions. This certainly would seem to make sense, given the conditions that our ancestors faced. How are positive emotions beneficial now?

BF: Resilience to stress and adversity is critical. When people get on track of being resilient, they are better able to find meaning in things. In an experiment we just carried out, we had one group of college students who recorded the positive meaning they found in daily events. We found that doing this on a daily basis did increase positive emotions, did increase resilience, and led to lower levels of depression, compared to a group of students who did not note the positive meaning they found in their experiences.

Hm, maybe if Vox always frames questions in a positive light it can contribute to the happiness of its users.