THRIVE Lab · Ashoka University
Current research
Three active lines of enquiry: the mechanisms that allow human flourishing to be cultivated on university campuses, the emotional structure of rhythm in North Indian classical music, and technology-based assessment at scale.
THRIVE Lab
Technology · Human flourishing · Resilience · Inclusion · Variation · Education
The lab studies how people flourish, and why the conditions for flourishing differ across minds. Neurodiversity is not treated as a separate topic here but as the reason the general question is hard: an educational environment that supports one kind of learner may do nothing for another, and averaged measures conceal exactly that. We work on mechanisms that can be measured objectively, and on the instruments needed to measure them at scale.
Human flourishing in higher education
Universities and colleges shape their students during a formative window of adult development, yet the environments they create are rarely designed with flourishing in mind. Our laboratory seeks to cultivate human flourishing in higher education intentionally rather than incidentally — treating the campus as an environment that can be built to support it.
Specifically, we ask which cognitive, affective, social and semantic mechanisms enable lasting flourishing across the lifespan, and how those mechanisms can be investigated objectively. That second condition is the one that does the work. Flourishing has been written about extensively and measured rarely; the aim here is an account that is testable rather than aspirational, resting on measurable mechanisms rather than on self-report of a desired end state.
The wider goal is to establish a new scientific foundation for understanding how educational institutions can systematically support human flourishing, resilience, ethical development and societal well-being — moving the question from what institutions ought to value to what they can be shown to produce.
Lines of enquiry
- Cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying sustained well-being
- Social and semantic processes through which campus environments act on students
- Objectively measurable indices of flourishing, suitable for longitudinal use
- How these mechanisms hold, or fail to hold, across the lifespan
Taal, raga and emotion
North Indian classical music is characterised by ragas, which constitute specific combinations of tonic intervals that elicit distinct emotions. Our earlier work provided the first empirical basis for that long-held claim: different ragas do elicit distinct emotional responses, and those responses could be explained by specific tonic intervals.
Melody, however, is only one axis of the tradition. We now focus on taal — the rhythmic cycles that organise a performance — and ask whether different taals are likewise linked to different emotions. If they are, the emotional response to Indian classical music cannot be attributed to tonal structure alone, and the interaction between melodic and rhythmic organisation becomes the more interesting object of study.
The raga findings established that the tradition's claims about emotion are empirically tractable. Taal asks whether the same is true of rhythm.
Technology-based assessments
Assessment is where most good findings stall. A measure that requires a trained specialist, a quiet room and an hour per child cannot reach the number of children who need it, and so difficulties go unidentified until they have already cost the child several years of schooling.
We design technology-based assessments to remove that bottleneck — digital instruments that can be administered at scale, in the learner's own language, by teachers rather than clinicians, and that return interpretable results rather than raw scores. The design problem is to keep the psychometric properties of a careful laboratory measure while making it robust enough for a classroom.
The assessment tools developed from this work are disseminated through NERD Tools, a New Delhi-based non-profit that puts them in the hands of schools, teachers and clinicians.
Collaboration and enquiries
All three lines are open to collaborators, doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers. Enquiries that engage with the specific questions above are the easiest to respond to usefully.