What’s Happiness Research About?
Our goal is to develop mathematical equations that explain how humans make decisions, to describe the factors that determine feelings like happiness, and to understand the relationship between happiness and the decisions we make.
By playing the games and completing the surveys in the app, you help us study the causes of happiness. This allows us to better understand how brain processes are linked to mental health problems like anxiety and depression, which may help to find new treatments.
What role do I play?
This is a ‘citizen science’ project. We take neuroscience experiments out of the lab and put them on your smartphone.
Every game you play is contributing data that will be used in real scientific research. We’ll publish the results of our studies in scientific journals and you can read about our discoveries online.
Read about our research in our blog for Psychology Today: The Happiness Equation.
Is my information safe?
Your privacy is very important to us. Your data is completely anonymized, which means we do not know who you are and we cannot find out. The app won’t ask for your name, email, phone number, or any other information that could be used to identify you.
We will never sell your data to any third party. We may make your anonymous data available for further research by other parties such as academic researchers.
Taking part is completely voluntary. You can withdraw completely from the experiment at any time in the Settings menu..
For details on privacy, please see more information in our Terms & Conditions.
The Games
How fast should I go?
The decisions we make are often not just about what to do but also how much of an effort to make. We often decide whether the extra effort is worth it. Scientists don’t know yet how our happiness depends on how hard we have to work for something, and that’s something we want to find out.
Catch as many fish as you can. The faster you tap, the more you get!
What makes me happy?
For both big and small decisions in life, we often face a dilemma: do I choose an option that is risky but could be highly rewarding, or instead an option that is safe but less rewarding? We want to know if how happy we feel when good and bad things happen to us might explain why some people take more risks than others.
Get as many points as you can. Decide when the risk is worth it!
How do I decide?
In this game, you play a pirate digging for treasure, and you know something about how many chances you will have to dig up treasure in the future. We want to know how that affects how happy you are right now, and whether it also affects the decisions you make.
Dig up as much gold as you can. The bigger the spoils, the higher the chance of coming up empty handed!
How fast do I learn?
How you noticed that being in a good mood can make a common experience feel more pleasant than usual? How happy we are might influence how we respond to and learn from what happens to us. In this game, hunt for precious gems by choosing different animals.
Find the animals with the most gems. See how fast you can learn and how many animals you can remember!
Get in touch.
Happiness Quest was created by neuroscientists working in the Rutledge lab at Yale University and at University College London in the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging.
Principal Investigator:
Robb Rutledge
Neuroscience Team:
Ilinca Angelescu, Rachel Bedder, Bastien Blain, Liam Mason,
Akshay Nair, Matilde Vaghi, Chang-Hao Kao, Huw Jarvis
Project management:
Gloria Feng, Jihyun Hur, Maddie Wallis, Millie Lawrence
