The Happiness Project

Rutledge Lab

About this app

Play short games to help brain scientists study the psychology and neuroscience of well-being!

Created by scientists at UCL and Yale, this app is a citizen science project taking psychology and neuroscience experiments from the lab to your smartphone.

Every 3-minute game that you finish contributes data to real scientific research about how the brain works. The anonymous surveys help us see what causes well-being and understand mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. Be part of a unique citizen science experiment and help us write the equation for happiness!

Dr Robb Rutledge (Yale Psychology) says: "We all want to know what determines happiness. It’s hard to figure it out! In our games, we ask people about their happiness as they make decisions in different situations. We hope people enjoy our app and help us answer some really important scientific questions!"

This citizen science project was supported by the UK Medical Research Council.

Ratings and reviews

Love to help science, but i wish the games had more actual info on each one and not just directions on how to play the game itself. I played a fruit one, and it was just picking 1 of 2 fruits with no way to tell which was the right one to pick. Very frustrating, though I think that is the object of the test. Some games make WAY mkre sense than others.

This app is okay. If you accidentally click the back button before you finish the game then it won't let you finish-it marks it with a checkmark. Then the same thing happened to the second game & only leaves you with the 2 questions, you end up with a score of 0 instead of letting you click on it again to get a score to help them... It didn't have anything to do with playing on multiple days. They're four squares, if you end up home before finished, you're left with questions & score is zero.

These games are easy and simplistic. The survey questions are a bit invasive, personal. But it's anonymous, (as much as anything online). I'm assuming this actually is "for Science", and I'm all for fighting depression as a disease (and personally I suppose). Anyway, if you've read this far, then download this app and pitch in.