TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - The University of Alabama psychology department will host the annual Harold Basowitz Memorial Lecture on Friday, Jan. 24, featuring guest speaker Dr. Ed Diener.

The public lecture will be held at 7 p.m. in 208 Gordon Palmer Hall on the UA campus. Diener’s lecture is titled “The Causes and Benefits of Happiness.” He is an alumni professor of psychology at the University of Illinois where he has been a faculty member since 1974.

Diener received his doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1974. He is past-president of the International Society of Quality of Life Studies and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. He won the 2000 Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies and a distinguished alumni award from California State University at Fresno.

Deiner has about 140 publications, of which approximately 90 are in the area of subjective well-being. He is listed as the second most published author in the first 30 years of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The Harold Basowitz Memorial Lecture is sponsored by the UA department of psychology in memory of Basowitz, who came to UA in 1940, as a student, and remained until called into military service. Basowitz returned to Tuscaloosa in 1946 and received his undergraduate degree from UA in 1947.