Frontiers in Health & Happiness
Aug 3, 2026 · 40 min · 12 segments
Can small daily actions meaningfully improve happiness and well-being? In this episode of *Frontiers in Health & Happiness*, host Ayla Fudala speaks with Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Science Director of…
Emiliana Simon-ThomasGuest
Ayla FudalaHost
To start, could you share how you first became interested in studying positive emotions like gratitude, love, and compassion?
So I was originally interested in how emotions influence thinking and decision making.
And as a graduate student, I focused on the easy ones to elicit in a systematic way, which is aversion and fear.
When I finished that, I just was interested in the other side of the spectrum of emotional experience.
And so I got really interested in these pro-social emotions, these affiliative states that drive us to orient towards the welfare of others.
And in studying them, it became more and more clear that they played a central role health and well-being over the lifespan and so I just thought this is so important for people to realize that these emotions that drive us to nurture one another to care to invest in each other to form long-term mutually benevolent supportive social bonds is is actually central to happiness and longevity
To start, could you share how you first became interested in studying positive emotions like gratitude, love, and compassion?
So I was originally interested in how emotions influence thinking and decision making.
And as a graduate student, I focused on the easy ones to elicit in a systematic way, which is aversion and fear.
When I finished that, I just was interested in the other side of the spectrum of emotional experience.
And so I got really interested in these pro-social emotions, these affiliative states that drive us to orient towards the welfare of others.
And in studying them, it became more and more clear that they played a central role health and well-being over the lifespan and so I just thought this is so important for people to realize that these emotions that drive us to nurture one another to care to invest in each other to form long-term mutually benevolent supportive social bonds is is actually central to happiness and longevity
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