Narrator:       This is Science Today. The Greater Good Science Center is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley. It's devoted to fostering scientific discoveries that lead to happy and compassionate people, promote strong social bonds, and altruistic behavior. Psychologist Dacher Keltner, who directs the center, says two big developments led to its founding.

Keltner:          One was 9/11 and we emerged right after that, where we were in this deep reflective period. And the other was in response to a convergent science that says that Americans are underperforming in terms of their well-being at the community level, family level, individual level. And we wanted to take this time-honored wisdom that now has the science behind it and give it away and close the gap. A lot of universities have science-based centers or scholarship-based centers and we're very robust to that and our fellows have gone to great academic positions. But what's unusual about our center is the outreach in terms of using new social media to reach parents and healthcare providers.

Narrator:       For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.