Neuroscientific Approach
Neuroscience and brain imaging has shown increasing potential for helping science understand happiness and sadness. Though it may be impossible to achieve any comprehensive measure of happiness objectively, some physiological correlates to happiness can be measured. Stefan Klein, in his book The Science of Happiness, links the dynamics of neurobiological systems (i.e., dopaminergic, opiate) to the concepts and findings of positive psychology and social psychology.
Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel and researcher Cynthia Fu describe their findings that depression can be diagnosed very accurately just by looking at fMRI brain scans. The idea is that, by identifying neural correlates for emotions, scientists may be able to use methods like brain scans to tell us more about all the different ways of being "happy".
Read more about this topic: Positive Psychology, Methods
Famous quotes containing the word approach:
“F.R. Leavis’s “eat up your broccoli” approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel—for the eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions—did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)