What does happiness mean to you? Friends, family, the rush of a crowd or the joy of solitude? Happiness is a fundamental human desire, yet we often struggle to achieve it. Understanding what does and does not make us happy is a growing field of scientific study. In this edition of The Why Factor, Sandra Kanthal asks if we can really teach people how to be happy.

Laurie Santos – Professor of Psychology, Yale University

(Photo: Notepad and smile emoticon on books. Credit: Getty Images)

Christopher Gunness explores why funerals matter so profoundly to us, as individuals and societies. He talks to people who have lost loved ones in Ghana, Pakistan and the UK about the challenges they have faced. He discovers how burial and cremation have become popular in different countries at different times, visits a green burial place and looks at the growing world of online memorials.

Presenter: Christopher Gunness

(Photo: Ghana, Accra Funeral Service. Credit: Getty Images)

Blending ingredients to produce something new is a distinctively human urge, and one of our most creative acts. We blend all sorts of products, such as tea, champagne and perfume. Did you know that blended whiskies combine over 30 single malts? In this week’s Why Factor, Barry Smith asks - why we blend. And why some blends work whilst others don’t.

Presenter: Barry Smith

As the world grows more urban, humanity moves further away from nature. Could this be the reason anxiety has become the most diagnosed mental illness in the west? The idea of mindfulness is becoming more popular as the mainstream grows more aware of how panicked we all are. How are we tackling this issue? Jordan Dunbar dives into a niche of researchers and therapists who are learning about and treating the negative symptoms of urban life with a dose of nature.

Lea Kendall, Therapist and James Kendall, Wilderness Instructor

Presented and Produced by Jordan Dunbar

The sports teams we support say something about who we are. Our identities are bound up with the men and women who play for our side – and we experience their success and failure as if they were our own. But, if supporting your team is so important, how can there be so many people who think these contests are of little consequence? Sandra Kanthal explores why we care so deeply about the outcome of a game.

Michael Sandel, professor of Government Theory - Harvard University

(Photo: Pakistan cricket superfans. Credit: Mohammed Arif, ECB National Growth Manager, Diverse Communities)

If the idea of being all alone, in silence, for long periods of time fills you with dread, it might be hard to understand why anyone would choose to be a hermit. But throughout history and across all cultures, there have been people who choose to leave behind the life and people they know to live in isolation and silence.

Guests:

Music by Ansuman Biswas and Stanley Keach.

Image: An isolated log cabin (Credit: Getty Images)

Open plan offices, hot-desking, group brainstorming sessions: collaboration seems to be king in the modern workplace. Recent studies have found that we are spending up to 80% of our working days either in meetings or dealing with requests from our colleagues. But is working together really the best way? Is the idea of collaboration something we’re fetishising at the cost of productivity and creativity, and have we lost sight of the benefits of working alone?

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far shares her own dislike of the BBC’s open-plan office and asks, in some desperation: why should we work together?

Guests:

Art Markman, professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Bring Your Brain to Work

Image: Workers in an open-plan office (Credit: Getty Images)

Schadenfreude is a German word that means “harm-joy”. It is the pleasure we feel from someone else’s misfortune, and it can come in many shades. It is the laughter we can’t stifle when someone unexpectedly falls over, or the triumphant pleasure we feel when a rival is defeated. We can also feel it when something bad happens to someone we genuinely like.

Edwina Pitman examines why, even when we’re happy and successful, we can’t help but enjoy others’ bad luck.

Contributors:

Presented and produced by Edwina Pitman

(Photo: Cheerful young woman lying on sofa with laptop in modern office lounge. Credit: Getty Images)

The history of computing is filled with the accomplishments of women. But in the West, the number of women taking computer science degrees has fallen sharply from its peak in the 1980s.

In the developing world, however, the trend is going in the other direction, because learning to code offers economic opportunities not available to women before. Women are still outnumbered in computer science classrooms, but there are more of them.

In this edition of The Why Factor on the BBC World Service, Sandra Kanthal asks why there areso few women in computer science, and what is driving them from a field they helped to create?

Guests:

Apple Macintosh Commercial – 1984 produced by Fairbanks Films

Image: A woman studies a computer screen (Credit: Getty Images)

Most of us feel some need to know a roadmap of our past, our connections with a family tree which took root before we were born. We look for stories to tell about where we come from and seek answers in the lives of our ancestors, even in the DNA they pass on to us. In this edition of the Why Factor, Viv Jones asks why we have such a fundamental need to discover the stories of our heritage, and what they tell us about ourselves.

Contributors:

Image: Woman admiring the sunset