Happiness: Emotion, Mood, or Character Trait
Starts:
Finishes:
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Happiness: Emotion, Mood, or Character Trait
Birkbeck Main Building (MAL), room G23
The view from 30,000 feet has it that there are two senses of ‘happiness’. In one sense, happiness is a psychological state. In a second sense, happiness concerns a life well lived (a life of value or flourishing). This very broad viewpoint quickly gives way to more specific questions. For example, what kind of psychological states is happiness? An emotion? A mood? And what constitutes a life well-lived? Is it something like a tick-box list of achievements, a matter of feeling good most of the time? Depending on how one thinks of the broad senses of happiness, the distance between them can look lesser or greater.
This workshop has a dual-aspect theme. First, focusing on the psychological sense of ‘happiness’, is happiness an emotion, a mood, or a character trait (or something else altogether)? Second, might conceiving of happiness as something with more duration than an emotion (such as a mood or a character trait) bring the broad senses closer together?
Schedule:
Birkbeck Main Building (MAL), room G23
January 5th (times in GMT)
11-12:30 Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham) — Can we be delusional and happy?
12:30-2 Lunch break
2-3:30 Jonathan Mitchell (Cardiff) — Affective experiences of higher values
3:30-4 Coffee/tea
4-5:30 Mark Textor (KCL) and Alex Grzankowski (Birkbeck) — Happiness is a mood
7: Dinner for speakers
January 6th
10:30-12: MM McCabe (KCL) — Choosing lives
12-1:30: Dan Haybron (Saint Louis University) — Happiness and human agency
1:30-2:30: Lunch
2:30-4: Luca Barlassina and Max Hayward (Sheffield) — Affect and satisfaction: from the folk concept of happiness to happiness (and back)
4-4:30: Coffee/tea
4:30-6: Christine Vitrano (CUNY Brooklyn) — A life well lived: happiness and goodness
Contact name:
Alex Grzankowski