Author
Sonja Lyubomirsky
The psychologist who tested which happiness practices work, for whom, and how often they should be done.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Sonja Lyubomirsky is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. Her research asks a question many psychologists once expected to have a discouraging answer: can people become lastingly happier, and if so, through what?
With Ken Sheldon and David Schkade she proposed, in 2005, a model of sustainable happiness that separates a set point, life circumstances and intentional activities; Jonathan Haidt later carried its formula, H = S + C + V, to a wide readership. Her experiments tested positive interventions such as expressing gratitude and doing acts of kindness, and paid unusual attention to dose, timing and fit. With Laura King and Ed Diener she also reviewed the evidence that happiness tends to come before success, not only after it.
The How of Happiness, published in 2007, turned that research into a practical programme of happiness activities, with a short diagnostic for choosing among them. The Myths of Happiness followed in 2013, on the turning points, in relationships, work and money, that people expect to make or break their happiness, and on how often they misjudge them.
The signature
Lyubomirsky writes as an experimenter who will not overpromise: an intervention, the study that tested it, what it did, and for whom it did less. Her signature is fit and dosage, the insistence that there is no single best happiness practice, only practices that suit a person, done at a rhythm that keeps them fresh.