Of particular relevance are the nature of feeling, mood, emotionally-driven behaviour, decision-making, attention and self-regulation, as well as the underlying physiology and neuroscience of the emotions.
Research over the last two decades suggests that many phenomena, ranging from individual cognitive processing to social and collective behavior, cannot be understood without taking into account affective determinants (i.e. motives, attitudes, moods, and emotions).
[2] The major challenge for this interdisciplinary domain is to integrate research focusing on the same phenomenon, emotion and similar affective processes, starting from different perspectives, theoretical backgrounds, and levels of analysis.
(www.authentichappiness.com is a website run by the University of Pennsylvania, where questionnaires are routinely taken by thousands of people all over the world based on a well-being criteria devised in the book 'Flourish.'
[3]) Nevertheless, Seligman mentions in the book the poor reliability of using this method as it is often entirely subjective to how the individual is feeling at the time, as opposed to questionnaires which test for more long standing personal features that contribute to well-being such as meaning in life.
Alongside this researchers also use functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography and physiological measures of skin conductance, muscle tension and hormone secretion.
It emphasizes basic research on emotion, culture, and psychopathology using a broad range of experimental, psychophysiological, neural, and genetic methods to test theory about psychological mechanisms underlying human behavior.