Hello and welcome to the psychology podcast with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman where we give

you insights into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. Each episode will feature a

new guest who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in.

Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility.

Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. cast. Today I'm really excited to have Dr. Keltner on the show. Professor Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of

California Berkeley where he is co-director of the Greater Good Science Center and where he investigates

the social functions of emotion. His book is Born to be good, the science of a meaningful life.

Thanks for being on the podcast today, Dacker.

It's good to be here, Scott.

Yeah, I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time, a big admirer of your work.

So I wanted to start by tracing the history

of your research interest because it's a true

you started studying negative emotions.

I did.

I spent a lot of time studying shame and embarrassment and anger and fear and like a lot of the field

you know in a science of emotion after a postdoc with Paul Ekman and I was making a lot of progress on those.

And then for accidental reasons,

you know, the kind of the yearbook photo study

that I did with Ravenna Helson that looked

at the predictive power of smiles in young women's lives and how. preventive laughter during really traumatic times like bereavement. I started to get interested in

positive states and just from there it opened up really dramatically.

Yeah and around this time you're studying this, I was the fit of positive psychology in existence yet as a thing?

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