Children’s and Adolescents’ Conceptions of Happiness

Previous research on children's and adolescents' happiness has mainly focused on the different variables that may contribute to it. However, very few studies have investigated the beliefs that children and adolescents hold about happiness. It is important to study developmental differences in the conceptions of happiness as beliefs affect people's emotions and behaviors, and they may help explain how children and adolescents strive for their own (and potentially others') happiness. To that aim, we asked 162 children and adolescents to define - in their own words - what happiness meant for them. Their responses were coded according to two different systems derived from previous finding with adults and children. Overall, results showed that hedonic conceptualization of happiness were mainly present in late childhood; whereas eudaimonic conceptualizations were mainly present in adolescence