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

Yang, F., Knobe, J., & Dunham, Y. (2021). Happiness is from the soul: The nature and origins of our happiness concept. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(2), 276–288, Jan 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000790

Rolf Degen's take: Rolf Degen on Twitter: "Even at young age, children proceed from the assumption that bad people are not happy. https://t.co/ae5VyZyma4 https://t.co/Ky4uX2sLbc"

Abstract: 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.