2025 Fall

PSYCH C162 001 - LEC 001

Human Happiness

Dacher Keltner

Aug 27, 2025 - Dec 12, 2025

Mo, We

01:00 pm - 01:59 pm

Dwinelle 155

Class #:25920

Units: 3

Instruction Mode: In-Person Instruction

Offered through Psychology

Current Enrollment

Total Open Seats: 42

Enrolled: 174

Waitlisted: 0

Capacity: 216

Waitlist Max: 0

Open Reserved Seats:

42 reserved for Psychology Majors

Hours & Workload

2 hours of instructor presentation of course materials per week, 6 hours of outside work hours per week, and 1 hours of the exchange of opinions or questions on course material per week.

Other classes by Dacher Keltner

PSYCH 290J 002 002SEM

This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to an understanding of happiness. The first part of the course will be devoted to the different treatments of happiness in the world's philosophical traditions, focusing up close on conceptions or the good life in classical Greek and Judeo-Christian thought, the great traditions in East Asian thought (Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism), and ideas about happiness that emerged more recently in the age of Enlightenment. With these different perspectives as a framework, the course will then turn to treatments of happiness in the behavioral sciences, evolutionary scholarship, and neuroscience. Special emphasis will be given to understanding how happiness arises in experiences of the moral emotions, including gratitude, compassion, reverence and awe, as well as aesthetic emotions like humor and beauty.

Class Notes

Phase I: 50% of seats are released at the beginning of Phase I. All seats are reserved for Psych majors. There is no waitlist. Additional seats may be added to impacted classes (up to 15% more if needed).
Phase II: More seats are added. All registered UC Berkeley students,
including intended Psychology majors, and UCEAP students can register at the beginning of their appointment. The waitlist will be open.
Adjustment Period:*More seats are added. All registered UC Berkeley
students and UCEAP students can enroll starting at 9 am on August 18th.

General Enrollment Guidelines:
- Requests for time conflict override will not be considered.
- If the class is full, monitor the enrollment periodically. Someone might drop.
- The Psychology department will not accommodate any requests to change
sections. Only students who are already enrolled can make section changes
via CalCentral if space permits. At the start of the semester, you will
have a chance to work with your instructor or GSI about changing sections.
- To be officially registered for a class, you must be signed up for both
the lecture and discussion sections.
- Psychology does not issue permission codes except for the honors program
courses, application only seminar courses, and DeCal courses.
- Psych C120 and Psych 130 have optional tutoring sessions. You don't need to be associated with a section to take advantage of this resource.
- For any questions regarding enrollment in Neuroscience or Cognitive
Science, please email neuenroll@berkeley.edu for Neuroscience classes or
issp-scheduler@berkeley.edu for Cognitive Science classes. show less