'Communities play a key role in creating happiness'

Communities play a big role in people being happy, said Dr Robert Waldinger, who is currently on a 10-day visit to Mumbai.

- Clara Lewis

Dr Waldinger, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Zen priest and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, at an interaction with the media in South Mumbai on Wednesday said nobody is happy all the time. "There are different types of happiness. There is hedonic well-being. Are we having a good time? This is temporary happiness that comes and goes. Eudaimonic happiness where there is a sense of meaning and purpose in life but not necessarily fun. The third flavour is a psychological rich flavour derived from varied interesting experiences," he said.

Dr Waldinger is director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development-an 85year-old study on happiness that started in 1938. It has had 724 participants of whom 40 are alive. While the first generation included 19-year-old sophomores from Harvard and another group of those who had had difficult childhoods, the second generation had people ranging in age from 29 years to 73 years old and the third generation is very vastly spread out.