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From the Buddha to modern day pop psychology, Tony Robbins and the like,

there have been about 200 suggestions for things to do to have more happiness.

Now, a lot of these are bogus.

And so, what we do in our laboratory is we test whether or not these actually work.

And I should say something about the methodology that we use.

So, when someone has a good idea about an intervention that might work,

first I do it on myself.

And as a pessimist and a depressive, I'm very sensitive to these things.

If it works for me, then I give it to my wife and my seven children.

Then I give it to my graduate students and

we start to do studies in the laboratory on it.

Now, we do massive studies in the following way.

So, I have a website, it's free, I urge all of you to go to it.

It's University of Pennsylvania website but

it's authentichappiness.org.

Now, this has the 20 leading tests of meaning,

parts of emotion, engagement, on it.

And you can take them and find out what your sense

of humor is relative to American females over the age of 40 and the like.

More than 3 million people have registered at the website and taken the test.

But, occasionally, we put up a link on exercises.

So, we put up a link that says exercises and

people go to it and we get 2,000 new people a day at the website.

So, we have huge numbers of people who are delighted to try out interventions.

If you go to that link when we put it up, it says,

Professor Seligman would like to find out what exercises

actually work in making people happier and relieving depression.

So, if you're willing to participate, you will get an exercise to do.

You won't know whether it's a valid exercise or a placebo.

We got lots of placebos in here.

You'll do the exercise for a week.

You'll report to us what you did.

And then we're going to bug you for the next six months.

To find out your depression, your anxiety, your life satisfaction, and the like.

Positive Interventions: Testing What Works