In summer 2024, the Lab embarked on a new four-year project, entitled “Well-Being in Social Media: Applying Natural Language Processing Analyses to Discover Thriving Online Communities, Promote Healthier Social Media Design and Authentic Happiness.” This project aims to develop a social media design that supports positivity in social media interactions – instead of negativity. We hypothesize that pro-social, positively-charged, highly-engaged interactions in social media increase the Subjective Well-Being (SWB) of individuals in such online communities. See our preliminary works in our pilot studies on Rewiring for Happiness (2021-23)
The participating FIMS Doctoral Students included Sarah Cornwell, Dominique Kelly and Sodiq Onaolapo, Alex Mayhew, and Nicole Delellis in the 2024/2025 academic year.
Going from “I” to “we” may help you get from ill-being to well-being.
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Director of Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre, in his interview about analyzing “The World Happiness Report.” The interview was conducted by Dr. Laurie Santos (Yale University Professor of Psychology and podcast host for The Happiness Lab).
Publications
The list of publications thus far include the following:
Onaolapo Sodiq and Victoria L. Rubin (2025) Library SCEB Model Advocating Positive Psychology Interventions in Library Settings (PDF) In The Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l’ACSI (ISSN 2562-7589), hybrid format, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 27-29, 2025.
Cornwell, Sarah E., Nicole S. Delellis, Dominique Kelly, Yifan Liu, Alexander Mayhew, Yimin Chen, and Victoria L. Rubin (2025) Theorizing Improved NLP Features for Promoting Behavior that Supports CMC Users’ Subjective Well-Being (PDF). In The Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l’ACSI (ISSN 2562-7589), hybrid format, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 27-29, 2025.