Happiness is from the soul: The nature and origins of our happiness concept.

What is happiness? Is happiness about feeling good or being good? Across 5 studies, we explored the nature and origins of our concept developmentally cross-linguistically. We found that surprisingly, children as young age 4 viewed morally bad people less happy than people, even if characters all have positive subjective states (Study 1). Moral character did not affect attributions physical traits 2) was more powerfully weighted in 3). Moreover, moral but intelligence influenced adults' 4). Finally, Chinese responded similarly when attributing with 2 words, despite one (Gao Xing) substantially descriptive other (Kuai Le) 5). Therefore, judgment plays a relatively unique role attributions, which surprisingly early emerging largely independent linguistic cultural influences, thus likely reflects fundamental cognitive feature mind. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, rights reserved).