The Rutledge Lab is located in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. We are trying to write the equations for happiness. This was our first equation:
In a series of studies including over 18,000 people playing our smartphone game, we found that happiness depends not on how well things are going, but whether they are going better than expected recently. Our equation lets us predict exactly how people will say they feel before we even ask them. We’ve published papers detailing how happiness relates to learning, social inequality, major depression, intrinsic reward, and even to the neurotransmitter dopamine and to brain scanning data. We’re working on projects to understand how happiness relates to effort, music, and language, among many other things. Affective states are a major feature of our conscious experience, but we still know surprisingly little about the neural and computational basis of our feelings. We are trying to answer a question that has been asked for hundreds of years: what determines happiness?
Tens of thousands of people around the world have participated in our research by playing games on their smartphones. Over 100,000 people downloaded our first app, The Great Brain Experiment. More than 20,000 people downloaded our apps specifically focused on understanding happiness and mental health. To participate in our research, download Happiness Quest and play games for science!
We also study how humans make decisions, which in many cases relates to the feelings we experience, and we study how decisions differ within and between individuals including people with mood disorders like major depression.
LAB NEWS
November 2025: We are organizing a conference! Come see us at Yale in New Haven for the fourth annual Computational Psychiatry Conference (July 14-16, 2026).
September 2025: Congratulations to Clara Haeffner for winning the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
September 2024: Congratulations to Jihyun Hur, Joey Heffner, and Gloria Feng! Their paper, Language sentiment predicts changes in depressive symptoms, is out now in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA!
September 2024: Congratulations to Gloria Feng! Her paper, Surprising sounds bias risky decision making, is out now in Nature Communications!
July 2024: Congratulations to Joey Heffner for winning a best poster award at the Computational Psychiatry Conference!
May 2024: Congratulations to Paul Sharp who will be an Assistant Professor at Bar-Ilan University in the fall!
April 2024: Congratulations to Gloria Feng for winning the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!