Founder, Meaning and Happiness.com

Dr. Steve Wright wants to help people be happier. He feels a sense of mission about bringing to the general public ideas for how to do this backed up by recent studies by research psychologists and other scientists. Dr. Wright wants to give you the simplicity on the other side of complexity (after the scientific research has been carried out to test the ideas).

Dr. Wright is a developmental psychologist whose research interests include happiness, life satisfaction and fulfillment, personal meaning, sense of community, and related topics. In his research on “sense of community,” he showed that people have a sense of purpose based on their contribution to their community, and also that they share in the larger “purpose” they see their group having in relation to the larger world. This extends the current theory of sense of community. At Cornell University he worked with Urie Bronfenbrenner on research into joint activities with others who were significant in their lives, and did related independent research on people who were important models in students’ lives.

Dr. Wright is part of a network of psychologists who identify themselves as contributing to the “positive psychology” movement, an effort to expand psychology beyond it’s primary focus on correcting problems (based on a “disease” model), and look at how people flourish, how they broaden and build upon the positive foundations of personal strengths, resilience, optimism, and healthy physical, intellectual, and social development (based on a “health” model). In 2004 he participated in a professional development course led by Martin Seligman, founder of the modern positive psychology movement.