Lara Aknin - The Science Of Happiness

ManTalks Podcast

Connor Beaton

Relationships, Education, Society & Culture, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.8 • 591 Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's more important than ever to ground healing work with expertise, careful research, and study. Otherwise, it's basically just cheerleading. This is why I brought on one of Canada's best social psychologists, Lara Aknin. Lara's work centers on not just what makes people happy, but what keeps them happy: gratitude, reminding yourself and others of shared connections and community, and more. Obviously, the pandemic shut out a lot of ways we cultivate connection and community—at least physically. So I wanted Lara to share some scientific grounding on how covid has affected anxiety and depression rates, stress levels, and mental resiliency in general. Lara Beth Aknin is a Canadian social psychologist. She is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Simon Fraser University and a Distinguished University Professor. After earning her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, Aknin joined the faculty of psychology at Simon Fraser University in 2012. That year, she published Giving Leads to Happiness in Young Children with J. Kiley Hamlin and Elizabeth Dunn, which supported the idea that humans may have evolved to find giving rewarding. In 2014, Lara and her colleagues Michael Norton and Elizabeth Dunn co-published a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and CIHR funded review of whether spending money had a positive effect on people's happiness. The following year, her contributions to the field of social psychology earned her the President’s New Researcher Award from the Canadian Psychological Association and a fellowship at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. By 2019, she received an SSHRC grant for her project, Can Repeated and Reflective Giving Nurture Canada's Next Generation of Philanthropists? She was also honored by the university for her research and contributions to social Psychology with the title of Distinguished SFU Professor. During the pandemic, she has served as Chair of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Task Force of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission. She also serves as an associate editor of the World Happiness Report. Connect with Lara: -Website: https://www.sfu.ca/psychology/about/people/profiles/laknin.html -Twitter: https://twitter.com/lbaknin -Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6a21v6wAAAAJ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to The Man Talk Show.
0:11.9	And joining me today is Dr. Lara Acknan.
0:15.7	She is a distinguished associate professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University, former fellow of the
0:22.0	Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a co-editor of the World Happiness Report.
0:28.9	She holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her research
0:34.1	focuses on the antecedents and consequences of happiness and pro-social behavior.
0:40.5	Most of her work examines how generous behavior makes people feel.
0:44.8	And her research has been published in various academic journals, including science, nature, human behavior.
0:50.5	She's been featured on and in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, McCLean's Magazine, Forbes, CBC, CNN, and so many more that I'm not going to list off here.
1:00.8	She's also the director of the Helping and Happiness Lab at Simon Fraser University.
1:06.6	What are we talking about in this episode?
1:08.5	Well, I, you know, obviously if you've been following me for a while,
1:12.1	if you've listened to some of the conversations and content that I have put out around COVID
1:18.9	and the impact, I've talked a little bit about the mental health impacts of lockdowns,
1:25.1	of being socially isolated and disconnected and some of the impact and ramifications
1:29.7	of the manner in which we have approached handling this pandemic. And interestingly enough,
1:38.8	Dr. Acknan led a team that looked at all of, maybe not all, because there's been a lot,
1:47.2	but a tremendous amount of the research and data that had been, that had been accumulated
1:55.1	over the course of COVID-19.
1:57.0	So looking at, you know, had rates of depression and anxiety gone up, how did it affect
2:03.7	our mental health, you know, things like lockdowns, how did they impact us?
2:09.0	And some of the decisions that we've made as a society, how has that impacted us socially?
	...

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