Department of Psychology.
Program in Cognitive Science.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2021 Feb;150(2):276-288. doi: 10.1037/xge0000790. Epub 2020 Jun 18.
What is happiness? Is happiness about feeling good or about being good? Across 5 studies, we explored the nature and origins of our happiness concept developmentally and cross-linguistically. We found that surprisingly, children as young as age 4 viewed morally bad people as less happy than morally good people, even if the characters all have positive subjective states (Study 1). Moral character did not affect attributions of physical traits (Study 2) and was more powerfully weighted than subjective states in attributions of happiness (Study 3). Moreover, moral character but not intelligence influenced children and adults' happiness attributions (Study 4). Finally, Chinese people responded similarly when attributing happiness with 2 words, despite one ("Gao Xing") being substantially more descriptive than the other ("Kuai Le") (Study 5). Therefore, we found that moral judgment plays a relatively unique role in happiness attributions, which is surprisingly early emerging and largely independent of linguistic and cultural influences, and thus likely reflects a fundamental cognitive feature of the mind. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
幸福是什么？幸福是感觉良好还是表现良好？在 5 项研究中，我们从发展和跨语言的角度探讨了幸福概念的本质和起源。我们惊讶地发现，早在 4 岁时，孩子们就认为道德败坏的人不如道德高尚的人幸福，即使这些角色都有积极的主观状态（研究 1）。道德品质并不影响对身体特征的归因（研究 2），而且在对幸福的归因中比主观状态更有影响力（研究 3）。此外，道德品质而不是智力影响儿童和成年人的幸福归因（研究 4）。最后，尽管一个词（“高兴”）比另一个词（“快乐”）更具描述性，但中国人在使用两个词来归因幸福时的反应是相似的（研究 5）。因此，我们发现道德判断在幸福归因中起着相对独特的作用，这种作用令人惊讶地很早就出现了，并且在很大程度上独立于语言和文化的影响，因此可能反映了思维的一个基本认知特征。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2021 APA，保留所有权利）。
