‘Big Bird’s hands were on my shoulders!’: the psychology professor who teamed up with Sesame Street
Big Bird is having a rotten day. There is a frown on his beak; his head is hanging down. He had been so excited to roller-skate around Sesame Street, but the rain ruined his plans. “I don’t like this feeling. I want it to go away,” he says, before naively suggesting that the solution is to wish for the rain to stop.
Luckily, he has a great new friend to help him deal with this feeling – Dr Laurie Santos, the professor behind Yale’s happiness course, the most popular course in the college’s history. She is also the host of the Happiness Lab podcast that Big Bird has joined her on “Big feelings like disappointment don’t go away quickly,” she tells him. “But there are things we can do … ”
It’s not the first time the happiness expert has called on Sesame Street’s furry puppets for help. Earlier this year, Elmo joined her on her podcast to launch a new collaboration between The Happiness Lab and Sesame Workshop (the non-profit that provides “learning, laughter, and life lessons to children all over the world”).
In the new three-part miniseries, she also speaks to Abby Cadabby about gratitude and Grover about self-talk. This isn’t just for the benefit of the children, though – it has been made with adults and their little ones in mind. But what exactly can we learn about the key to happiness from a yellow bird, a pink fairy and a blue monster?
“Happiness strategies seem to work whether you’re three or 103,” Santos says over Zoom. “A lot of the ones I’m teaching my students in my Yale class are what I wish they had learned when they were toddlers.” She is a huge fan of Sesame Street (“I got to do a photoshoot with characters and that was just incredible. Big Bird’s hands were on my shoulders!”) and – because it taught her so much while growing up – it seemed a natural fit for educating families on mental wellbeing.
Take the simple concept of gratitude, for example. Abby Cadabby adorably talks about being grumpy because of her annoying brother and her favourite sparkly socks being dirty. It tees Santos up for conversations with fellow happiness experts about negativity bias and how to overcome it by hitting pause and taking notice.
“Our minds naturally gravitate to all the bad stuff in life, all the hassles,” Santos says. “But there’s so much evidence that we can intentionally start to focus on the good things, with just a little shift in our perspective.” One easy tip she gives to parents is to ask kids to share the day’s good things over dinner.
“Our youngest audience – children – are often overlooked when we talk about mental health and emotional wellbeing,” says Kay Wilson Stallings, executive vice president of creative development at Sesame Workshop – a job that is as fun as it sounds (“I oversee all development and production of Sesame Street”).
“There’s growing evidence that young children are struggling even more now than ever, especially coming out of the pandemic,” Wilson Stallings adds, which is why she asked Santos to work on various projects that utilise her curriculum, including a new animated series. “One big blocker [to happiness] today is one that adults also face,” adds Santos. “We often think that happiness is about having no negative emotions … but the science shows we would be better off if we embraced that.”
Who better to illustrate this than Oscar the Grouch? “I really love the idea of engaging with Oscar, who is known for his grouchiness, to use him to show that sometimes negative emotions are useful,” Santos says. “They’re normative; they’re teaching us things. Neuroscientific work from James Gross, a professor at Stanford, shows that suppressing these emotions has consequences on your cardiovascular health, your memory and decision making.”
Another lesson she would like to explore is thinking about your bigger purpose. “We tend to think that happiness is all about pleasing yourself and self care,” she says. “But there’s lots of evidence that happiness seems to be more about being other-oriented, doing nice things for other people and connecting with other people.”
But in the current series, it is the episode on self-talk that Santos and Wilson Stallings found most helpful. In the episode, the tables turn – Grover (along with expert friends) helps Santos deal with a rubbish morning. What did she learn? “There’s evidence that sixyear-olds who talk to themselves as though they’re a superhero can persist in tasks better!” she says, but there’s definitely no age limit on it. “Use your superhero voice and talk to yourself like, ‘Go Super Laurie, you can do it!’”
In future, there’s one character that Wilson Stallings, who knows the Sesame Street residents inside out, thinks would be perfect to teach a life lesson – one that’s highly relatable: “We
know that cookies make Cookie Monster happy: he could help us learn about self-regulation – how to just not eat all the cookies at once.”
And what of Big Bird – does he turn his day around? After some deep belly breaths, shaking a jar of glitter and playing a game of 5-4-3-2-1 to get out of his emotions and into his senses (listing five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste), it might still be raining but his emotional weather has cleared up. By the end, he’s got his raincoat and wellies on, ready to have fun jumping in some puddles.
The first episode in the Happiness
Lab x Sesame Street miniseries is out now, with episodes weekly on Mondays for the next fortnight.