Lorraine Besser Receives Grant for Happiness and Well-being Study

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Associate Professor of Philosophy Lorraine Besser has received support from a Templeton Foundation-funded initiative called the Happiness and Well-Being Project, based at St. Louis University.

She and a collaborator at the University of Virginia received a two year grant to work on an interdisciplinary project titled “What is the Good Life? The Happy life, the Perfectionist Life, or the Psychologically Rich Life?” which investigates the possibility that a psychologically rich life is a candidate for the good life.

They research team will conduct a series of studies to determine whether or not people consider a psychologically rich life to be a good life, and to determine whether they structure their lives differently from people who consider happiness or perfection to be the good life.