Following approval from Ethics committee, we will invite & recruit 20 participants each time for six separate sessions (we assume that following ethical approval, they have understood and voluntarily agreed to participate in the study and have consented to be photographed and their data used for analyses) over a two-year time period. At the start of the nine-day residential retreat, we will administer the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire to the retreat participants. The participants will also sign an agreement that they will consent to them being photographed. We will use video photography to continuously record the sessions (sitting, standing, walking). We will use "smiling" and facial relaxation as indicators of happiness & will compare them with the scores on happiness classification obtained through the Oxford questionnaire. These data will be analysed using R for statistical computing using the "caret" package to identify patterns of happiness and to derive measures of happiness indicators \cite{r_cite}. This project will lead to the development of a set of objective facial expression markers of genuine happiness as obtained through the faces of healthy volunteer meditators of different levels of experience.  

Significance of this work

This work will provide a basis for an objective measurement of the trait of genuine happiness. It will draw on the literature on happiness traits in positive psychology but also draw on the principles of machine learning artificial intelligence and analysis of digital images to match the traits identified by survey questionnaires and match with automated image processing to validate the questionnaires.