Judy Moskowitz has spent decades studying an uncomfortable but useful question: what role can positive emotion play when the stress is real, severe, and not going away? Dr. Moskowitz is a Professor and Vice Chair for Scientific and Faculty Development in the Department of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Her research focuses on a positive emotion regulation intervention developed by her team, which aims to increase positive emotions, reduce stress and depression, and improve health behaviors. This includes trials with Alzheimer's caregivers, people living with HIV, frontline gun violence prevention staff, and in applications in general population samples.

Today’s guest is Dr. Suzanne Segerstrom, the Jo Anne Leonard Petersen Endowed Chair for Gerontology and Family Studies at Oregon State University, where she is a professor and director of the Center for Healthy Aging Research. Her work examines when psychological factors such as personality, optimism, and self-regulation affect the immune system, how those effects change across adulthood, and how brain health fits into the picture.

In this episode I talk with Dr. Kent Berridge, who is the James Olds Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan. His research examines the brain mechanisms of pleasure, desire, motivation, emotion, reward, and addiction, and shows us why dopamine is not a simple pleasure chemical.

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. She is the Fahmy and Donna Attallah Professor of Humanistic Psychology at the University of Southern California, where she is a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience and the founding director of the Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education, or CANDLE. A former public school science teacher, she studies how emotion, social experience, and the stories we build about what happens to us shape learning and development. Her book, Emotions, Learning, and the Brain, helped bring affective neuroscience into conversation with education, and her recent longitudinal research follows adolescents as they engage in what her team calls “transcendent thinking”: moving beyond immediate facts to consider values, identity, systems, ethics, and possible futures. “Big picture” thinking helps us far more than we may realize.

Today’s guest is Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist, the Pam R. Rollins Professor of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and Medical Director of Emory Executive Health. She is a board-certified internal-medicine physician whose clinical and research work focuses on healthy aging, prevention, lifestyle medicine, and the ways daily behavior interacts with resilience. Her book, The Stress Paradox, asks whether we have treated all stress as the same problem. Living well, she argues, requires not the elimination of challenge, but a wiser relationship with it.

My guest in this episode is Kimberly Malone, Assistant Director of Prison Education at Northeastern University in New York. For more than a decade, she has taught incarcerated students and helped lead college programs in men's and women's prisons across medium- and maximum-security settings. She is also president of Rising Hope, a nonprofit providing postsecondary education in New York prisons. Join us as we discuss the connection between happiness, hope, and education, especially for people who don't have many choices.

What changes when wellbeing is treated as a dynamic system rather than a personal checklist? How can we measure flourishing without flattening out how a human life actually works? My guest in this episode, Dr. Peggy Kern, is a professor at the Centre for Wellbeing Science at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Education in Australia. Her research focuses on questions like these and draws on a variety of methodologies to examine who thrives in life and why, and what we can do about it.

In this episode I talk with Dr. Matthew Zawadzki, a health psychologist and professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of California, Merced. His work examines how everyday experiences shape our health and well-being. That includes stress, loneliness, and even the ways we spend our free time. One of the central questions in his research is why a stressful event can be over while our minds and bodies remain caught in it. He studies worry and rumination--the thoughts that keep stress active--and uses real-time methods to understand what happens as people move through ordinary life.

This episode's guest is Dr. Matthew Johnson. Since 2004, he's played a role in the revival of psychedelic research, publishing on psychedelics in relation to mystical experience, personality change, risk and safety, ethics, and the treatment of tobacco addiction, cancer distress, and depression. He's also known for his expertise in behavioral economics, addiction, sexual risk behavior, and research across a wide range of drugs and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, Fox News, the BBC, and more.

Dr. Tim Lomas is a Psychology Research Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who studies why most happiness research is too Western, too narrow, and too focused on positive states to capture how people actually flourish across the full diversity of human cultures. He joins me in this episode for a conversation about untranslatable well-being words, the case for negative emotions, and what a 22-country study reveals about flourishing.