On the first day of the conference, Lisa Kamen presented a movie she made in the course of her study of Spiritual Psychology at Santa Monica University in a session called H-Factor….Where is Your Heart?

The movie, where Lisa interviews people as diverse as Los Angeles county prisoners, New York cabbies, the homeless, children, and happiness researchers like Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Biswas-Diener, was very well received by the audience and sparked many interesting questions. The strength of the movie is in the fact that all of these people are asked the same question, What is your happiness?

From a psychological point of view, viewing happiness as a unitary construct, rather than as satisfaction, engagement, meaning, etc, may not yield research answers, but the diverse viewpoints captured in first person accounts gives the movie a contextual richness that goes beyond most any of the research presented at the conference.

Lisa lives in Los Angeles and plans to take the movie to film festivals after getting a final cut together. You can actually view the movie at www.whatisyourhappiness.com. Other ideas for the future include creating a charitable foundation and using it in schools to teach happiness. I actually hope to bring her to USC to show her film to our science of happiness class.

The project was done as part of her master’s thesis and the genesis of the project was in a cycling trip in India, where she witnessed joyous people living in poverty. Her natural question was how to teach her daughter, a “child of means”, the true definition of happiness beyond money. As such, the film was written with her daughter in mind (she’s the director of photography) and Lisa mentioned that her 11 year old daughter’s conception of happiness has moved beyond chocolate as a result of her involvement.

Incidentally, Lisa’s happiness is found in “having a voice” to share things she is passionate about, such as her movie.