OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The happiness of individuals is an important metric for societies, but we know little about how the cumulative influence of daily life events are aggregated into subjective feelings. Using computational modeling, I show that momentary happiness in a decision-making task is explained not by task earnings, but by the combined influence of past rewards and expectations. The robustness of this account was evident in a large-scale smartphone-based replication. I use a combination of neuroimaging and pharmacology to investigate the neural basis of happiness, finding that it relates to dopamine. I then show that this computational approach can be used to investigate the link between mood and behaviour in psychiatric disorders including major depression and bipolar disorder.
