LocationBartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab DescriptionDr. C. Otto Scharmer is a senior lecturer at MIT, the founding chair of the Presencing Ins…

Lecamwasam K, Bresle E, Martiny KM, et al. Beyond Performance: A Mixed-Methods Study of Carnegie Hall’s Well-Being Concerts. Health Promotion Practice. 2025;0(0). doi:10.1177/15248399251361095

LocationSheraton Austin, Capitol ABCD, 701 E. 11th St. Description

Kumar, I. K. (2023). FOSTERING WELL-BEING: Designing Technology to Improve the Psychological Well-being of Foster-Involved Youth (thesis).

Lecamwasam, K., Bartleet, B. L., Ortiz, T., & Koebner, I. (2025). Promoting the well-being of infants and caregivers through music: insights from the lullaby project’s international convening. Arts & Health, 1-11.

The research on Community-based Social Innovation focuses on the reshaping of urban spaces by human social behavior, incorporating an analy…

Dykes, G., Groff, J., Renfrew-Knight, H., & Sutch, D. (2010). Driving Social Innovation in Education. An HP white paper.

The third salon in our series aimed at advancing interdisciplinary lunar policy thinking relevant to near term lunar activity.

C. Breazeal, A. Thomaz

Hope, Alexis. (2021). Social Change through Community Innovation: Feminist and Participatory Design Approaches to Organizing Inclusive, Equitable, and Joyful Hackathons (Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA).

As of 2021, the MIT Media Lab's Social Machines group has merged with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. The Laboratory fo…

Orii, L., Alonso, L. and Larson, K., 2020. Methodology for Establishing Well-Being Urban Indicators at the District Level to be Used on the CityScope Platform. Sustainability, 12(22), p.9458.

News coverage of a research collaboration with OpenAI investigating how chatbots affect users' social and emotional wellbeing

We’re starting to get a better sense of how chatbots are affecting us—but there’s still a lot we don’t know.

T. Nishikata, T. Hardjono and A. Pentland, Social Capital Accounting, October 2018.

Researchers from the City Science group collaborated with the Tiresia research group at the Politecnico di Milano to examine the impact, go…

LocationMIT Media Lab Description Host/Chair: (Unpublished) John Moore

LocationMIT Media Lab Description Additional Featured Research By (Unpublished) New Media Medicine Host/Chair: (Unpublished) John Moore

Lecamwasam, K.H.M. (2023). Pharmamusicology: Exploring the Impact of Music on the Physiology and Psychology of Anxiety Disorders and Well-Being. Master's Thesis, MIT Media Lab.

The following Media Lab students joined the MIT India Initiative in Mumbai for this workshop.

Téo Xisto of the Lifelong Kindergarten group is among the recipients of the 2026 Joan Ganz Cooney Center Well-Being by Design Fellowship

Tuesday, April 1st 2025

LocationMIT Media Lab, 3rd Floor Atrium DescriptionJohn Ratey will address the connection between exercise and the brain's performance and …

LocationMIT Media Lab, E14-633 DescriptionPhysical and biological needs of the brain must be met as a precondition for "higher" functions t…

LocationMIT Media Lab, E14-633 DescriptionMarko Ahtisaari is a technology entrepreneur and designer. For the last four years he was executi…

LocationE15 Bartos Auditorium DescriptionWhy do we reach for a cookie when we know an apple is better for us, even if we’re trying to lose …

Despite living in an increasingly connected world, loneliness and social isolation are prevalent issues today. While social robots have bee…

Loneliness is a growing and global issue that affects approximately a third of individuals in industrialized countries. Given the…

Special lecture by psychologist Barbara FredricksonAre the moments of positive interpersonal connection we experience positive health behav…

Pataranutaporn, P., Danry, V., Leong, J. et al. AI-generated characters for supporting personalized learning and well-being. Nat Mach Intell (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00417-9

Kubzansky LD, Kim ES, Boehm JK, Davidson RJ, Huffman JC, Loucks EB, Lyubomirsky S, Picard RW, Schueller SM, Trudel-Fitzgerald C, VanderWeele TJ, Warran K, Yeager DS, Yeh CS, Moskowitz JT. Interventions to Modify Psychological Well-Being: Progress, Promises, and an Agenda for Future Research. Affect Sci. 2023 Mar 3;4(1):174-184. doi: 10.1007/s42761-022-00167-w. PMID: 37064816; PMCID: PMC9982781.

In the Social Algorithms research group, we study how algorithmic systems in daily life shape access, agency, and opportunity—often in ways…

MIT has developed an extension that allows knowing the emotional impact caused by the content that everyone creates and consumes on Twitter.

Emotional wellbeing is an important indicator of overall health and poor emotional wellbeing can equally adversely affect one's overal…

LocationMIT Media Lab, E14-633 DescriptionDigital self-tracking, sometimes called "life hacking" or "personal analytics," involves parsing …

Computers that analyze people’s feelings and stress? Those days are already here. Dr. Rosalind Picard, founder and director of the Affectiv…

LocationMIT Media Lab, E15-LL, Bartos Theater DescriptionThe human brain is made up of neurons, highly sophisticated and stable cellular st…

Ostrowski, A.K., DiPaola, D., Partridge E., Park, H.W., & Breazeal, C. (2019). Older Adults Living with Social Robots: Promoting Social Connectedness in Long-Term Communities. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine. doi: 10.1109/MRA.2019.2905234

LocationMIT Media Lab, E14-525 (Nagashima Conference Room) DescriptionPART 1: Investigating Well-being and Character in PsychologyPART 2: D…

DescriptionJP Onnela is an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is interested …

When they’re valued as design research partners, older adults feel empowered to contribute to technology design.

People use AI chatbots like ChatGPT in many ways—asking questions, sparking creativity, solving problems, and even for personal interaction…

Das, M., Ostrowski, A.K., Ben-David, S., Roeder, G.J., Kimura, K., D’Ignazio, C., Breazeal, C., Yang, M, & Verma, A. Auditing design justice: The impact of social movements on design pedagogy at a technology institution. Design Studies.

This project aimed at enhancing the social-emotional and educational experiences of Arabic-speaking refugee children. The project leverages…

*Senthil, S., *Fedor, S., Zhang, B., Nathan, V., Stickgold, R., Picard, R. W., Associations Between Circadian Sleep Alignment, Sleep Regularity, and Wellbeing: Evidence from Wearable Data, In *Proceedings of the IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI’25), Atlanta, GA, USA

ESG+Community

Over 600,000 youth in the United States experience abuse or neglect each year. Youth who are deemed to be at risk of significant harm in th…

Former Director, MIT Media Lab; Apollo Professor of Astronautics

We are exploring how social robots can be used to improve connection to others and are looking for participants age 18+ located in the US

P. Pataranutaporn, N. Powdthavee, C. Archiwaranguprok, & P. Maes, Simulating human well-being with large language models: Systematic validation and misestimation across 64,000 individuals from 64 countries, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (48) e2519394122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2519394122 (2025).

How AI Became a Third Party in Our Relationships, According to the MIT Media Lab’s Cyborg Psychology Group.

Former Media Lab Professor Ethan Zuckerman speaks with The New York Times about the future of social media.

Nosakhare, E., Picard, R. W. Probabilistic Latent Variable Modeling for Assessing Behavioral Influences on Well-Being," ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’19), August 4–8, 2019, Anchorage, AK, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292500.3330738

Resonance at low frequencies strongly influences a room's perception of sound, which can enhance or deteriorate the acoustic experience. Pr…

Shen, J., Lee, A., Alghowinem, S., Adkins, R., Breazeal, C., & Park, H. W. (2025). Social robots as social proxies for fostering connection and empathy towards humanity. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2025), Melbourne, Australia. ACM.

Narain, J.*, Quach, T.*, Davey, M.*, Park, H., Braezeal, C., and Picard, R. "Promoting Wellbeing with Sunny, a Chatbot that Facilitates Positive Messages within Social Groups". Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Accepted. *Equal Contribution.

Biomimicry looks to living organisms to create the future of sustainable engineering.

Can AI Predict Human Happiness? Researchers Simulate Well-Being for 64,000 Individuals WorldwideA new study reveals both promise and peril …

DescriptionThis talk is part of the Advancing Wellbeing seminar series at the MIT Media Lab. For information about future talks, please joi…

Nosakhare, E., and Picard. R. 2019. Toward Assessing and Recommending Combinations of Behaviors for Improving Health and Well-Being. ACM Trans. Comput. Healthcare 1, 1, Article 4 (December 2019), 29 pages.

Four out of eleven selected research projects were from the Media Lab community.

In Scientific American, Dr. Alex Lipton and Media Lab Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland call for the creation of new banking regulations.