The collision between traditional culture and positive psychology is expected.

At the end of last century, there appeared a new research trend in the field of western psychology-positive psychology research. The founders of this trend of thought are famous contemporary American psychologists Martin Seyrig Mann, Sheldon and Laura King. They believe that positive psychology is a science devoted to studying the vitality and virtue of ordinary people.

Positive psychology, with its inherent, potential and constructive power, cultivates people's positive psychology, gives full play to people's advantages and virtues, thus promoting the development of individuals and society and making mankind move towards happiness. To explore the advantages and virtues of human beings, positive psychology has something in common with many philosophical theories in history, and it also has its own characteristics: using the relatively perfect and effective experimental methods and measurement means of psychology at present.

In modern society, more and more people suffer from mental illness, mainly depression. In this regard, positive psychology attaches importance to the prevention of mental illness, and puts forward the idea of active prevention, arguing that effective prevention can be achieved by tapping the individual's own strength in the predicament. This is similar to the idea of improving human immunity to prevent diseases.

People are social, which is often ignored in previous psychology, and even studied people's psychology from their social environment. According to positive psychology, we must examine people's psychology in social, cultural and ecological systems, and pay attention to the relationship among people's experiences, people's positive qualities and social background. Linking personal happiness with social harmony is one of the most positive aspects of positive psychology.

In the past, psychology focused on the weaknesses and shortcomings of human nature, forming a pessimistic view of human nature. Based on humanistic psychology, positive psychology pays attention to the advantages of human nature, advocates the research and exploration of human virtue, and restores the positive side of human nature. However, some people question that positive psychology ignores the role of psychological passive defense mechanism and cannot face the weakness of human nature directly.

It is understood that positive psychology is an academic research trend in the field of international psychology in recent ten years, and it has quickly attracted the attention of the whole world. In China, although the research and exploration of positive psychology is still in its infancy, more and more schools have introduced positive psychology into school education. As a new ideological trend with great vitality in the field of psychology, positive psychology has huge space and broad prospects for its future development in China, and many domestic scholars have expectations for the development of positive psychology.

Some scholars believe that positive psychology lacks influential longitudinal research and cross-racial and cross-cultural research because of its short development history. For example, due to cultural differences, people have different understandings of happiness and happiness. People's psychology is universal and more specific. Therefore, the development of positive psychology in China should be combined with the traditional culture of China. In academic circles, there have been many papers discussing the combination of positive psychology and China traditional culture. Some scholars have pointed out that the positive psychological thought of China's traditional culture is "self-cultivation, keeping the family in harmony, leveling the world", "self-improvement, respecting morality" and "being poor, being alone, and osawa helping the world".

In my opinion, in the traditional culture of China, Confucianism is the most compatible with positive psychology. For example, Martin Seyrig found that human beings have six universal virtues: wisdom, courage, kindness, justice, temperance and spiritual Excellence. These six universal virtues have long been similarly summarized by Confucianism: benevolence, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom and faith. According to Confucianism, only by achieving "harmony" can people be happy. Harmony is the harmony between people, between people and society, between people and nature, between science and technology and humanities.

Confucian psychology affirms people's transcendental moral consciousness-conscience, aiming at pursuing justice (the sum of benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom), promoting people's enthusiasm and tapping people's potential by combining knowledge with practice. "Goodness" belongs to both moral category and interest category, which should be the unity of morality and interest. Positive, happy, happy, hello, I am all "good", and vice versa. Psychology believes that conscience has the instinct to distinguish between good and evil, so after distinguishing between good and evil, we should "eliminate evil with virtue" in our life and work, which is the "positive psychology" of Confucianism.

Originally published in Zengcheng Daily