Happiness Scientist Dr. Laurie Santos Speaks to the Hopkins Community

Santos explained that although the average person’s response to negative emotions is to push those feelings down, cognitive and physical consequences arise from this suppression. She cited a Stanford University study, which found that bottling up emotions inhibits the brain from performing well on cognitively demanding activities and contributes to cardiac stress. Santos's “favorite strategies” for navigating negative emotions are meditation practices: recognizing the negative emotion, allowing it to be felt, investigating the feeling, and nurturing it by using self-compassion.

“If you take away one thing from this assembly, I think this is the hack that you really should take away,” she said. “Studies find that these practices can reduce burnout.”

Santos went on to summarize the main insights she teaches in her Yale course, Psychology and the Good Life, which investigates how to make wiser choices for a better life using the science of psychology.

“Congratulations, you just made it through a whole Yale class in 20 minutes,” she concluded. “I hope I’ve given you some good strategies to feel a little bit better.”

Psychology and the Good Life has been adapted into a free Coursera program that has been taken by over 4 million people to date.

After her talk, Santos answered questions from three students from the peer support club: student head Emily S. ’26, Keelan L. ’27, and Ava M. ’27. The students asked her questions ranging from school-related inquiries, like how to balance a heavy workload, to broader discussion questions, like what constitutes bad versus good screen time. Santos kept driving home the point of practicing radical self-acceptance for when times get hard and negative emotions arise, and the importance of not just work-life balance, but work-life harmony. 

In conjunction with the assembly's theme of happiness, the event finished with community time on the quad with apple cider and donuts.

Santos, a Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology and former Head of Silliman College at Yale University, visited Hopkins as part of the 2025–2026 speaker series. Inviting guest speakers to campus to share real-world experiences and impart time-tested wisdom is a longstanding tradition at Hopkins School. During the 2025–2026 academic year, Hopkins is elevating this tradition by bringing together a group of dynamic speakers to discuss a wide variety of topics. The goal of the series is simple: to bring the world to Hopkins. Learn more about the speaker series here.