This Site Offers Life Improvement Via “Happiness Science”
What’s the Latest Development?
As of today (Oct. 22), a new Web site promises to help people “hone their happiness skills.” Happify provides a series of tools and activities that were built using techniques gleaned from the field of positive psychology. These tools combine to create a structured program that co-founder Ofer Leidner says “[creates] an experience that helps drive people toward achieving these goals of well-being and happiness.” A nine-month beta test with 100,000 people found that 86 percent improved their happiness scores after two months of regular use, and the average user visited the site two to three times a week.
What’s the Big Idea?
Unlike most psychology, positive psychology “studies positive human functioning…and aims to help people improve resilience, compassion, confidence and other qualities associated with happiness.” The field has been slowly gaining attention in both academic and popular circles, but Leidner says the findings haven’t gotten to the public quickly enough. Happify aims to do its part, but while part of the site is available for free, the rest of it requires a paid subscription.
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