太平天国西王HighBeam Rearch
Title: Positive psychology and character strengths: application to strengths-bad school counling.(Report)
Date: December 1, 2008 Publication: Professional School Counling Author: Park, Nansook; Peterson, Christopher
The basic premi of positive psychology is that the happiness and fulfillment of children and youth entail more than the identification and treatment of their problems. This article provides an overview of positive psychology and the Values in Action (VIA) project that classifies and measures 24 widely recognized character strengths. Good character is multidimensional, made up of a family of positive traits manifest in an individual's thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Recent rearch findings are prented concerning the correlates and the conquences of the VIA character strengths for positive youth development. Character strengths are related to achievement, life satisfaction, and well-being of children and youth. Further, the implications and specific techniques informed by positive psychology are discusd for school counlors in the context of a strengths-bad approach.
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Raising children who are happy, healthy, and morally good is the ultimate goal of all parents and educators. Although specific definitions of happiness, health, and good character may vary across time, place, and culture, their importance for personal as well as societal well-being cannot be contested. In previous decades, rearchers and practitioners focud largely on psychopathology, developing treatment strategies and risk-bad prevention programs. In recent years, the traditional approaches--all bad on a dia model in which health and well-being are defined only by the abnce of distress and disorder--have been challenged. Calls have been made for balanced attention to the positive aspects of human development, including life satisfaction and character strengths. Psychologists and school counlors interested in promoting human potential need to start with different assumptions and to po different questions from their peers who assume only a dia model (Park & Peterson, 2006b).
POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Positive psychology is the scientific study of what goes right in life (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). It is the study of optimal experience--people being their best and doing their best. Positive psychology is a newly christened approach within psychology that takes riously as a subject matter tho things that make life most worth living. Positive psychology does not deny the problems
that people experience, and positive psychologists do not ignore stress and challenge in their attempts to understanding what it means to live well. Positive psychology intends to complement business-as-usual psychology, not replace it, by expanding the topics of legitimate study to yield a full and balanced depiction of human thriving and flourishing. The most basic assumption that positive psychology urges is that human goodness and excellence are as authentic as dia, disorder, and distress and therefore derve equal attention from psychologists and human rvice providers (Peterson & Park, 2003).
The contribution of contemporary positive psychology has been twofold: (a) providing an umbrella term for what had been isolated lines of theory and rearch, and (b) making the lf-conscious argument that what makes life worth living derves its own field of inquiry within psychology (Peterson & Park, 2003). The framework of positive psychology provides a comprehensive scheme for describing and understanding the good life. Domains identified by positive psychology as critical to the psychological good life include positive subjective experiences (e.g., happiness, life satisfaction, fulfillment, flow); positive individual traits (e.g., character, interests, values); positive relationships (e.g., friendship, marriage, colleagueship); and positive groups and institutions (e.g., families, schools, business, communities). Positive groups and institutions enable the developmen
t and display of positive relationships and positive traits, which in turn enable positive subjective experiences. People are at their best when institutions, relationships, traits, and experiences are in alignment, and doing well in life reprents a coming together of all four domains.
Positive psychology argues that the goal of counling should be more than moving students from -5 to 0--the abnce of a problem, the presumed goal of business-as-usual psychology. The ultimate goal of interventions informed by positive psychology is helping people with or without problems to lead a fulfilling life, moving them to +2 or +5 or beyond, regardless of where they start. This is the novel contribution of positive psychology.
Positive psychology also emphasizes prevention as oppod to remediation. Whatever the prenting complaints, students also bring into counling asts and strengths that can be ud to resolve their problems. A crucial task of any counling effort is therefore to identify a student's resources and encourage their u. Such a balanced emphasis should build rapport and bolster student confidence, which in turn should facilitate the success of counling.
雨夜CHARACTER STRENGTHS AND VIRTUES
婚假几天What is good of a person, how can we measure it, and how can we build good character among chil
dren and youth? The timeless questions were asked by the Athenian philosophers and are still pod by modern psychologists and educators. Positive psychology has refocud scientific attention on character, identifying it as one of the pillars of this new field and central to the understanding of the psychological good life (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).
Character refers to tho aspects of personality that are morally valued. Good character is at the core of positive youth development. Baumrind (1998) noted that "it takes virtuous character to will the good, and competence to do good well" (p. 13). Most schooling and youth programs today focus on helping youth acquire skills and abilities--reading, writing, doing math, and thinking critically--that can help them to achieve their life goals. However, without good character, individuals may not desire to do the right thing.
Good character is central to psychological and social well-being. It is not simply the abnce of problems but rather a well-developed family of positive traits. The building and enhancing of character strengths not only reduce the possibility of negative outcomes (Botvin, Baker, Dunbury, Botvin, & Diaz, 1995) but are important in their own right as indicators and indeed caus of healthy positive lifelong development and thriving (Colby & Damon, 1992; Park, 2004a; Weissberg & Greenberg, 1997). Growing evidence shows that certain strengths of character--for example, hope, k
indness, social intelligence, lf-control, and perspective--can buffer against the negative effects of stress and trauma, preventing or mitigating disorders in their wake (Park t & Peterson, 2006b). Character strengths also help youth to thrive. Good character is associated with desired outcomes such as school success, leadership, tolerance and the valuing of diversity, the ability to delay gratification, kindness, and altruism (Scales, Benson, Leffert, & Blyth, 2000). Good
character is associated with a reduction of problems such as substance u, alcohol abu, smoking, violence, depression, and suicidal ideation (Park, 2004a).
Although a growing rearch literature has contributed much to our understanding of such positive traits as altruism, gratitude, and lf-control, most of the lines of rearch have focud on one component of character at a time, leaving unanswered questions about the underlying structure of character within an individual (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Some individuals may be wi and have integrity but are neither courageous nor kind, or vice versa. Thus, there is a need for a systematic approach to character in multidimensional terms.
THE VALUES IN ACTION PROJECT
For veral years, guided by the perspective of positive psychology, we have been involved in a proj参差的读音
ect that address important strengths of character (Park & Peterson, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Peterson & Seligman, 2004). The resulting project--Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths--focus on the strengths of character that contribute to optimal human development. The project first defined, identified, and classified connsual components of good character and virtues and then devid ways to asss the components as individual differences relevant for different cultural and developmental groups. The VIA classification identifies 24 widely acknowledged and acclaimed character strengths and organizes them under six broad virtues (e Table 1). We have argued that each strength is morally valued in its own right. The most general contribution of the VIA project is to provide a vocabulary for psychologically informed discussion of the personal qualities of individuals that make them worthy of moral prai.
In our work, virtues are the core characteristics valued by moral philosophers and religious thinkers: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. The broad categories of virtue emerge consistently from historical surveys. Character is the entire t of positive traits that have appeared across cultures and throughout history as important for the good life. Character strengths are the psychological process or mechanisms that define the virtues. The strengths are ubiquitously recognized and valued. Character strengths are the subt of personality traits on w
hich moral value is placed. Introversion and extraversion, for example, are traits with no moral weight.
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Kindness and teamwork, in contrast, are morally valued, which is why they are considered character strengths.
By implication, therefore, good character is (a) a family of positive traits that exist as individual differences--in principle distinct strengths that people posss to varying degrees; (b) shown in thoughts, feelings, and actions; (c) malleable across the lifespan; (d) measurable; and (e) subject to numerous influences by contextual factors, proximal and distal. This way of conceptualizing good character has important implications for asssment.
遵循造句We measure character as manifest in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This approach parates our work from tho of others who approach moral competence in terms of moral reasoning or abstract values. Character is plural and must be measured in ways that do justice to its breadth. One needs to be cautious about arching for single indicators of good character. It would be misleading to treat a single component of character such as hope, kindness, or teamwork as the whole of character. Individuals might be very kind or very hopeful but lack the other components of good char
acter. Rearchers interested in character per must asss it in its full range. Good character can only be captured by a t of components that vary across people. Our measure is unique in that it not only allows for the comparison of character strengths across individuals but also allows ipsative scoring--identifying an individual's "signature strengths" relative to his or her other strengths.
We developed parate surveys to asss strengths among adults and youth. The VIA Inventory of Strengths for Youth (VIA-Youth) is a lf-report survey that allows a comprehensive asssment of the 24 character strengths among youth ages 10-17 (Park, 2004a). The current VIA-Youth measure contains 198 items and takes about 45 minutes on average to complete. The survey has good reliability (alphas in all cas exceed .70) and construct validity (e Park & Peterson, 2006c, for details). The surveys are available online at no cost (www. viastrengths or www.authentichappiness). Later in this article, we discuss examples of how school counlors can u the VIA-Youth.
滇王之印Once individuals complete the strengths survey, feedback is given about their top strengths--we call them signature strengths. Helping students to identify their signature strengths and u them in their everyday lives may provide a route to a psychologically
fulfilling life (Seligman, 2002). The effects of naming the strengths for an individual and encouraging their u derve study. We offer a few caveats. Positive traits not included among a respondent's signature strengths are not necessarily weakness but simply lesr strengths in comparison to the others. The order of top strengths (e.g., among one's top five strengths) should not be interpreted in a rigid way becau there may be no meaningful differences among them.
The measures of character strengths that we have developed are relatively efficient, but they take time to administer, and younger respondents sometimes require supervision to prevent break-off effects due to wandering attention. However, anyone interested in asssing character strengths needs to appreciate that there is no shortcut to measuring good character. No one questions that the asssment of intellectual ability requires hours on the part of rearchers and individual rearch participants. The asssment of moral competence is no simpler and certainly no less important (Park & Peterson, 2005).
EMPIRICAL FINDINGS
Evidence concerning the correlates and positive outcomes of the character strengths is accumulating. Although all strengths of character contribute to fulfillment--happiness broadly constru
ed--certain positive traits are more robustly associated with well-being and fulfillment than others (Park, Peterson, & Seligman, 2004a). Overall, the youth in America show most of the components of good character (Park & Peterson, 2006c). Despite widespread negative perceptions of youth, the majority of young people have developed character strengths. Among them, gratitude, humor, and love are most common, whereas prudence, forgiveness, spirituality, and lf-regulation are least common, much as is found among adults.
In general, the strengths of character consistently related to life satisfaction are gratitude, hope, zest, curiosity, and, perhaps most importantly, love, defined as the ability to sustain reciprocated clo relationships with other people (Park et al., 2004a). Thus, for a good life, individuals need to cultivate the strengths in particular.
奇迹造句We also have discovered developmental differences. Gratitude shows an association with life satisfaction only among children who are at least 7 years of age (Park & Peterson, 2006a), and curiosity is related to life satisfaction only among adults. Given that curiosity is
