I love thinking of joy as “the good mood of the soul.” There is definitely something soulful about joy. Based on our research, I define joy as an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation. Researcher Matthew Kuan Johnson explains that people find experiences of joy difficult to articulate. He hypothesizes that the very nature of joy pushes the boundaries of our ability to communicate about lived experience via spoken language. He also suggests that because language can shape lived experience, cultures that have more words to describe the emotion of joy may also
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