The Rutledge Lab is located in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. We are trying to write the equations for happiness. This was our first equation:
In a series of studies including over 18,000 people playing our smartphone game, we found that happiness depends not on how well things are going, but whether they are going better than expected recently. Our equation lets us predict exactly how people will say they feel before we even ask them. We’ve published papers detailing how happiness relates to learning, social inequality, major depression, intrinsic reward, and to dopamine and brain scanning data. We’re working on projects to understand how happiness relates to effort, music, and language, among many other things. Affective states are a major feature of our conscious experience, but we still know surprisingly little about the neural and computational basis of our feelings.
Tens of thousands of people around the world have participated in our research by playing games on their smartphones. Over 100,000 people downloaded our first app, The Great Brain Experiment. More than 20,000 people downloaded our apps specifically focused on understanding happiness. To participate in our research, download Happiness Quest and play games for science!
We also study how humans make decisions, which in many cases relates to the feelings we experience, and we study how decisions differ within and between individuals including people with mood disorders.
LAB NEWS
June 2023: With colleagues at Mount Sinai, UCL, and TCD, we are organizing a conference! Come see us in Dublin at the inaugural Computational Psychiatry Conference (July 6-8). Lab presentations by Gloria Feng, Giacomo Glotzer, Joey Heffner, Jihyun Hur, Millie Lawrence, Katie Myerscough, Akshay Nair, and Huw Jarvis.
May 2023: Congratulations to lab members starting PhD programs in the fall! Jihyun Hur will be staying nearby in the Yale Clinical Psychology PhD program. Giacomo Glotzer will be joining the Neuroscience PhD program at Rockefeller University.
April 2023: Congratulations to Rachel Bedder and Matilde Vaghi for their new paper Risk taking for potential losses but not gains increases with time of day out now in Scientific Reports!
March 2023: A pair of collaborations out now in Nature Human Behavior! Insights into the accuracy of social scientists’ forecasts of societal change and A highly replicable decline in mood during rest and simple tasks.
February 2023: Congratulations to Chang-Hao Kao, Gloria Feng, Jihyun Hur, Huw Jarvis for their new review Computational models of subjective feelings in psychiatry out now in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews!
October 2022: Congratulations to Robb for winning the Early Career Award from the Society for Neuroeconomics!
September 2022: Congratulations to new PhD student Gloria Feng for winning the Wu Tsai Graduate Fellowship!
September 2022: Congratulations to lab alums Matilde Vaghi and Bastien Blain! Matilde is now a Lecturer (assistant professor) in Psychology at University of East Anglia. Bastien is now an Assistant Professor at the Sorbonne Economics Centre at University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
August 2022: Welcome to the lab Joey, Chelsea, Millie, and Katie! Joey Heffner is joining us a postdoc. Chelsea Uddenberg and Millie Lawrence are joining us as research technicians. Katie Myerscough is our new lab manager.