Happiness conference convenes in San Francisco

By Patricia Leigh Brown Published: November 27, 2008


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SAN FRANCISCO: The stock market has been on a roller coaster, banks are going under, unemployment is skyrocketing and foreclosed homes pepper the landscape. What better time for a happiness conference?

In this dopamine-laden city, where the pursuit of well-being is something of a high art, a motley array of scientists, philosophers, doctors, psychologists, navel-gazing Googlers and Tibetan Buddhists addressed the latest findings on the science of human happiness - or eudaemonia, the classical Greek term for human flourishing.

Planned before the current crises, the first American "Happiness and Its Causes" conference was equal parts Aristotle and Oprah. It brought together heavy hitters like Paul Ekman, the psychologist known for deciphering facial "microexpressions" that reveal feelings, and Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford biologist. They considered topics like "Compassion and the Pursuit of Happiness" and "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers."

The conference is the latest manifestation of the booming happiness industry, subject of a growing number of books, scholarly research papers and academic courses. The concept began in Sydney in 2006 and has since expanded, its profile raised by the Dalai Lama's participation in Sydney in 2007.

The two-day gathering in San Francisco this week, which cost $545, benefited a nonprofit group offering Buddhist teachings to prisoners. ..(Int. Herald Tribune)