土豪的世界难懂！阿联酋任命一位“幸福部长”

20160802ou 一中两外锵锵三人行 今日话题： 土豪的世界难懂！阿联酋任命一位“幸福部长” LW: Now, a recent report says that in the United Arab Emirates, we have something quite interesting coming about. Happiness training? Happiness inspectors? What exactly is going on there, Nick? NL: Yes, earlier this year, the United Arab Emirates started a happiness drive where they were looking at building upon the happiness of their citizens. The prime minister announced the first Minister of State for Happiness back in February, that is Ohood al Roumi, and she took up the new role and says that the training program is part of the efforts to make the UAE one of the happiest countries in the world, and as part of this, she has now come up with a new initiative. A group of 60 people are the country’s first Chief Happiness and Positivity Officers. They will leave the country heading to the UK and the US, where they will study things like positive psychology, mindfulness, all these kind of techniques. They hope to bring back the techniques on how to spread happiness among the population. LW: Yoyo, what do you think? WY: This is Pursuit of Happiness coming to real life. LW: That’s not a very happy movie, I will say. WY: I think it is a good movie! LW: There’s a lot of sadness in the Pursuit of Happiness. WY: Okay, but there is a happy ending. So the country has tried its best, and also the question can be, is happiness something that can be taught and learned in classes? NL: Interesting question. On the face of it, I would instinctively say no, but then that would kind of invalidate this whole program, so maybe we could find some middle ground. I think there are definitely strategies or techniques for being happy that can be taught, whether everybody needs that is another question. It will be interesting to see how the results get measured, as well. WY: Well I have a perfect example here in China, because we all know Chinese students can be very hard-working, and also sometimes, before the college entrance examination, they suffer from great stress, and also sometimes depression, but in China some universities have initiated the course of positive psychology, which is also dubbed ‘happiness class’, so happiness can be taught this time. And this is from the Chinese University of Geosciences – when the course was opened, immediately over 100 students signed up to the class. You can see that there is this kind of positive psychology classes, or we call it happiness classes, it is simply to deal with students’ depression or sometimes for people who are suffering from depression or even OCD, so I think it can help a certain group of people, but to a large extent, do you think that happiness can be learned and taught? LW: Yeah. The interesting thing about this is, I wonder, because if you ask most people, if they’re happy, I wonder here, if we are going from people who are unhappy, people who are quite struggling, and moving up towards happy, you know, or we’re not going from people who are just kind of, meh, okay, but then who move up to kind of an insane level of happiness.