Ian Robertson of Trinity College Dublin and Aoibhinn N? Sh?illeabh?in of the Science Gallery (Image: Patrick Bolger/Science Gallery)
Pay a visit to Happy? Take a Second Look, a new exhibition at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, and you?ll soon realise you?re not there to observe, so much as to put in some hard work.
I'm one of the first through the doors, and after registering a few details - including consent - I find myself in a surprisingly bright and airy isolation pod. My first task is a computer-based study to see how someone's sense of humour affects our perception of their facial attractiveness. Or as the brochure eloquently puts it: if you are happier are you hotter?
All around the compact exhibition, people are similarly taking part in studies aimed to investigate a range of questions: can thinking about a good deed make you happy? Is happiness linked to language? What aspects of our lives most affect our happiness? Some even demonstrate how simple body movements like feigning a smile or looking up could, quite literally, lift the mood.
The exhibition kicked off last week as part of the Dublin City of Science 2012 Festival. So why the focus on happiness?
"Modern economists are beginning to realise that actually, psychological well-being is as big a factor - maybe even a bigger factor - in a country's well-being as any financial or material wealth," says Ian Robertson, professor of psychology at Trinity.
The exhibition also marks the 50th anniversary of Trinity College's School of Psychology: "We decided that a series of research studies into happiness and its causes and consequences was an ideal way to mark the occasion," Robertson says.
Aside from the riot of cheerfulness taking place at the Gallery, Happy? is also looking to take the broader pulse of Ireland's mood through its National Happiness Experiment, which is led by psychologist and exhibition co-curator Malcolm MacLachlan. Supported by telecoms company Vodafone, the initiative hopes to send text messages to as many as 5,000 registered participants in Ireland over the coming weeks. When prompted, they get to rate their happiness from a morose '1' to a positively elated '11'. "We want to see how it relates to things that are happening, like sporting events," explains Science Gallery's programme manager Lynn Scarff.
Another project is tapping into Twitter to locate and measure the 'Vibes of Ireland' over time, using the hashtag #sghappy. It is the brainchild of 18-year- old Dublin school student James Eggers, who has devised a program that uses around 8000 emotional keywords to determine the happiness rating of a tweet.
When tweet information comes into the Gallery, it is integrated into a digital map of Ireland where each county changes colour depending on the mood, Eggers says. Based on trends he has already seen with the system, you can expect glum, blue hues on Thursday mornings but a predictable flood of happy yellows at 6pm on Fridays.
Data from the exhibition will feed into studies being carried out by various researchers at Trinity and could eventually be published. But visitors to the ?Lab in the Gallery? aren?t mere guinea pigs - you can learn plenty about happiness as you go through the experiments and demonstrations.
For example, after completing my stint on the sense of humour-attractiveness experiment, the screen tells me that, in the case of women, we tend to perceive happy faces as being more attractive. That put a smile on my face.
Happy? Take a Second Look is at Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland until 3 June 2012Follow @CultureLabNS on Twitter
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