Are Happiness and Well-Being Really U-Shaped Over the Lifecourse?

SEC’s November Presentation: Happiness is often described as being U-shaped over adulthood—starting high, declining to a midlife slump, then improving thereafter despite social losses and declines in health. Though some claim that this U-shape is a fundamental feature of human lives, happiness has mostly been studied in high-income countries. To provide a broader perspective, our speaker, UCSB Prof. Michael Gurven, will discuss age-profiles of subjective well-being among non-industrialized societies where people lack formal institutions that promote social welfare. Ensuring successful aging for the global population will require greater focus on cultural, social and economic determinants of individual life trajectories.

Our November Speaker: Michael Gurven is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also Associate Director of the Broom Center for Demography. His research program applies an evolutionary lens to help inform our understanding of aging and today’s complex diseases. Since 2002, Gurven has co-directed the Tsimane’ Health and Life History Project to better understand how aspects of environment and lifestyle affect health and lifespan in subsistence-level societies. He has worked for over two decades with remote South American Indigenous populations, and is an expert on demographic, ecological and epidemiological studies of contemp-orary hunter-gatherers, farmers and other non-market populations living traditional lifestyles. He has over 290 publications, including the recent book, *Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer *(Princeton). His research has received national and international attention, including *New York Times*, *BBC*, *NPR, Scientific American* and *Wall Street Journal*.

Location: Our speaker will present in person at Community West Bank conference room at 445 Pine Ave. off Hollister Ave. in Goleta, and on Zoom. When you register, we send a confirmation email containing Zoom data, directions to the in-person location and meal details.