Theoretical Research Of Grateful Psychology

Since the universal phenomenon of gratitude has been the concern of human, at all times and in all over the world many thinkers, philosophers, politicians, sociologists and even economists have observed, speculated and summarized its development and background, which has produced many identical or different ideas about thankful psychology.The research of thankful psychology has always been the main concern of positive psychology and moral psychology. In positive psychology, gratitude is viewed as a kind of trait which can help establish excellent personality; whereas in moral psychology, gratitude is viewed as a kind of moral emotion. McCullough studied these two different points of view, and made a thorough research by regarding thankful mentality as emotional quality, state of mind, and emotional experience. There are other scholars summarized the concept of gratitude, thinking that gratitude is some kind of appreciation and identification which generated from heart after accepting the kindness from other people, society and nature, and also a kind of cognition and behavior willing to repay. Quoting professor Xu Yuanli’s three-dimensional Emotional Theory, this paper focuses on its emotional characteristics in studying thankful psychologyGrateful individuals should be more likely to count their blessings. The very act of recalling positive life events should increase their accessibility. Gratitude’s unique qualities-its ability to point people toward others who have benefited them, its power to motivate people to persist in treating others with kindness, its power to motivate people to requite their benefactors, and its power to motivate people to "pay it forward"-suggests that gratitude may have been instrumental in the evolution of humans’prodigious tendencies to cooperate with non-kin. Grateful people gave more credit to others for their accomplishments. Trust, and the willingness to give people credit for their accomplishments, are important lubricants for social exchange. Gratitude was naturally selected for its ability to accelerate the process of converting relationships with strangers and acquaintances into close, trusting friendships so that genetically unrelated individuals could more reliably benefit from cooperation with non-kin. So psychological effects such as these may help to explain how gratitude promotes generosity and helping. Gratitude, as seen a compound of "tender emotion and negative self-feeling". By negative self-feeling, Some people was referring to the perceived inferiority of the receiver relative to the giver. But, it must be acknowledged that gratitude plays a role in the dark side of morality, the morality of subjugation, in which the destruction or humiliation of others is viewed as a moral duty.On the basis of detailed data collection, this paper analyses the background, ideological origin, semantic connotation, psychological thoughts and the existing disputes of thankful psychology, aiming to reveal the real condition of it objectively and systematically. In the end, this paper discusses the function and cultivation of thankful psychology.