We’ve mentioned here before that Tal Ben-Shahar‘s positive psychology class was getting a good deal of coverage in the Harvard Crimson.
Ben-Shahar founded the Harvard Objectivist Club in the 1990s and is currently an instructor at Harvard, where he teaches the largest class on campus, positive psychology.
Now his class is getting coverage in major media outlets, including Fox News (Four Happiness Tips from Tal Ben-Shahar), NPR (Finding Happiness in a Harvard Classroom), and the New York Post (C’mon, Get Happy).
He was also interviewed on Boston’s “Good Morning Live,” the video of which is available online (scroll down to “Harvard Psychology Professor Tal Ben-Shahar” on 3/16/06).
The central premise of positive psychology — the importance of personal happiness — is one that Ayn Rand understood and appreciated in her writings and in her philosophy of Objectivism.
Positive psychology, as a field, has elevated the importance of personal happiness to a science, allowing people to study the empirical precursors of happiness rather than relying on folk psychology remedies.
There is a lot of good work being done in this field, and professor Ben-Shahar has probably done more than anyone recently to bring that information into the public eye.
