ABSTRACT
Individuals are typically happy when engaging in enjoyable activities. But many enjoyable activities could be harmful when engaged in to excess. Do children consider the normative goodness of activity engagement levels when attributing happiness? To examine this question, we presented children with enjoyable activities that are often harmless in moderation but harmful in excess. When told that engaging in their favorite activities at their preferred amount was either normatively good (i.e., harmless and permitted) or normatively bad (i.e., harmful and forbidden), 10- and 11-year-old and 7- and 8-year-old children (Study 1) and even 5-year-old children (Studies 2 and 3 with simplified methods) attributed less happiness when the engagement level was normatively bad than when it was normatively good both to themselves and to another child. Young children also perceived normatively bad engagement as less interesting and pleasurable (Study 3). The findings suggest that children consider the normative goodness of activity engagement (rather than enjoyment alone) when attributing happiness, illuminating how children understand happiness.
Subject(s)
Happiness , Pleasure , Humans , Child, Preschool , ChildABSTRACT
We review key aspects of young children's concept of knowledge. First, we discuss children's early insights into the way that information can be communicated from informant to recipient as well as their active search for information via questions. We then analyze the way that preschool children talk explicitly and cogently about knowledge and the presuppositions they make in doing so. We argue that all children, irrespective of culture and language, eventually arrive at the same fundamental conception of knowledge in the preschool years. Nevertheless, despite the universality of this basic conception, young children are likely to show considerable variation in their pattern of information seeking, depending on the conversational practices of their family and culture.
