Virtual: Brain meeting: Dr Robb Rutledge

Brain meeting 

The happiness of individuals is an important metric for societies, but we know little about how daily life events are aggregated into subjective feelings. We have shown that happiness depends on the history of rewards and expectations, a result we have now replicated in thousands of individuals using smartphone-based data collection and quantified in relation to major depression. Using fMRI, we show how happiness relates to neural activity in the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Computational modelling shows precisely how feelings vary across individuals in relation to a wide variety of factors including intrinsic rewards, future prospects, social inequality, and altruistic behaviour. Finally, we show that happiness reflects learning processes and does not always depend on reward.