Four years ago the Young Foundation launched a programme on wellbeing and resilience. Through our research and practical projects we aim to demonstrate that promoting and influencing happiness and wellbeing is not an airy aspiration.

Yet these concerns aren't new. Through their work at the Queen Mary Centre of the History of Emotions Dr Thomas Dixon and Dr Rhodri Hayward have analysed how preoccupations about wellbeing have recurred cyclically. The Victorians, for example, worried feverishly about mechanistic approaches to education which failed to produce rounded human beings.

This seminar explored the long history of emotional education raising questions about practice and policy today - from the role of schools in developing resilience in children to the importance of developing stories in new communities.

Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. He is the author of From Passions to Emotions (Cambridge, 2003) and The Invention of Altruism (Oxford, 2008). Dr Rhodri Hayward is Wellcome Award Lecturer at the Centre of the History of the Emotions and the author of Resisting History: Popular Religion and the Invention of the Unconscious (Manchester, 2007).

Listen to the audio recording.