As two enormous, golden doors part, sunlight pours into an atrium filled with babies and puppies. Everyone is smiling. The air smells of freshly mown mint. Ripe avocados rain from the sky. (Somehow, they always miss the babies.) This is Harvard University’s new Center for Health and Happiness.
At least, this is how I imagine it could grow to look. At a launch ceremony on Friday, the Harvard School of Public Health announced a $21 million initial investment in the happiness center. Its goal is to promote the role of what’s broadly referred to as “positive psychological wellbeing” in bodily health.
“We don't have a building at present,” clarified Laura Kubzansky, the center’s co-director and a professor of social and behavioral health at Harvard. At the moment, the happiness center will occupy part of the School of Public Health in Boston. Like happiness itself, it will at first be an ethereal entity produced by collaboration between people—in this case psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, physicians, and epidemiologists (studying distribution and determinants of disease) from across the university.
[For more of this story, written by James Hamblin, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...or-happiness/479784/]
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