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London Times, May 21, 2002, Berkeley Center Offers a Course in Peace and Love Berkeley became famous for anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s. Now, decades later the university campus near San Francisco has again become an academic haven for hippies, offering studies in peace and love as the University of California at Berkeley opens a department of social psychology dedicated to finding out what makes us mellow. In its first three weeks, The Greater Good Science Center has already been nicknamed "the joy centre" by students and researchers. "I think Berkeley is the natural, organic place for this to arise and develop, but I really think that it will connect to a lot of people very intuitively," Dacher Keltner, associate professor of psychology at the university and the centre's founding director, said. Mr Keltner started to plan the department in February last year in an effort to turn the discipline of social psychology on its head. Funding was partly provided by Thomas and Ruth Ann Hornaday, who attended Berkeley in the early 1960s and donated $1 million (Pounds 685,000) to further their belief that peace "should be an inalienable right of every human being". The centre's research will focus on what makes certain relationships successful and what makes us happy, while traditional psychology and sociology tends to focus on why relationships break down and what makes us unhappy. |