Priya Ghanta didn’t change what she was doing. She changed why she was doing it. Now she’s much happier.
During one session of her Science of Happiness course, taught by social scientist Patty Van Cappellen, Ghanta took the instructor’s advice: If there are activities you enjoy, schedule time to do them. So the sophomore identified two things that bring her joy — playing violin and working out — and stopped treating them as things she has to do, but things she gets to do. Though Ghanta has played violin since she was a child, she’s happier to pick up her instrument these days. Going to the gym no longer feels like a task to get out of the way. It makes her feel powerful.
“I want to know how to hack my brain,” Ghanta says with unmistakable excitement.
This is by design.
Outside of class, Van Cappellen is at the forefront of social scientists seeking to understand happiness. She is an associate research professor at the Social Science Research Institute and also director of the Interdisciplinary Behavioral Research Center, which supports social and behavioral research at Duke. In the Science of Happiness course, Van Cappellen teaches from a wealth of research surrounding real, sustainable positivity and shares scientifically backed strategies to increase positivity in her students’ lives.
“What [the students] will remember is what worked for them in their life and their critical thinking,” Van Cappellen says.
On a Tuesday morning in a glass-walled classroom below Perkins Library, clumps of students rotate between whiteboard prompts. Each one is related to a stage in the modal model of emotion. The first is situation modification, so the students brainstorm ways to approach situations to maximize positivity in their lives. Then, attention deployment: How can they control what they focus on in the moment? Then cognitive change, which is basically choosing bright-side thinking. Finally, response modulation, or how to process a situation positively after the fact.
Some of these steps are tough. Cognitive change, for instance, can be difficult to separate from response modulation. These are Duke students, so the groups tangle with these distinctions with the same rigor as they would with microbiology or computer science challenges.
To that end, Van Cappellen is on the cutting edge, as positivity has only been studied seriously for about a decade. Previously, emotional regulation literature focused on reducing negatives rather than amplifying positives. So when the activity concludes and Van Cappellen notes that people who intervene at situation selection have greater satisfaction and less depression in their lives, she has the numbers to back it up.
Van Cappellen’s own research is in the same new direction.
“Hope is very central in people’s lives,” she says. “We don’t know a lot about this in psychology.”
She studies how people flourish, considering individual and collective flourishing side by side. She studies religion, but not theologically. Rather, she looks at how the beliefs, practices and even physical movements during worship of believers relate to their emotional state. Sure, happiness is subjective. It looks different to different people, but it’s still real.
“We take people at their word,” Van Cappellen says.
In the Science of Happiness course, she encounters misconceptions about positivity. One is that happiness is something people attain only after a major life achievement. Another, that happiness means never being sad or negative. Another, that happiness is for extroverts. Yet another, that happiness is shallow.
Van Cappellen opens a Thursday morning class by noting a 2023 surgeon general’s warning about the public health crisis of loneliness, with its elevated risk of premature death. Loneliness, she explains, strains the health care system and can lead to polarization and violence. Social connections, however, reduce stress and vigilance — two costly physiological states. Van Cappellen illustrates the point with a picture of three ostriches. Two are watching for predators so a third can safely lower its head to eat.
That’s survival. That’s hardly shallow.
“I’m very critical of myself,” says Ghanta. “I think a lot of Duke students are.”
The sophomore is a high achiever, like her classmates, and her assignments and projects don’t relent. Prioritizing positive events doesn’t make her stressors go away. Rather, Ghanta found a sense of gratitude that she can exist and be able to do the things she loves, all because of a simple mental shift she learned from Van Cappellen. Some of the pressure left her life, she says with amazement, and she found new interest in her passions.
“Your perception influences everything,” Ghanta says.