Linking Positive Psychology and Intercultural Competence by Movies: Evidence From Brunei and Romania

Abstract

Cultural consumption provides numerous benefits for individuals, especially for younger generations. Imaginary travel narratives can shape people’s perceptions about other cultures thus are useful tools for developing intercultural competences. On the other hand, positive psychology provides an approach to understand different aspects of students/youngsters’ wellbeing. This study investigates the wellbeing associated with learning the meanings of being different and growing in emotional resilience, flexibility, and openness to other cultures through movies. The positive psychology approach was used to examine the benefits of movie consumption in order to investigate the activation of five domains of wellbeing: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (PERMA). The research methodology consisted of the experiment and questionnaire survey. The students’ scores on the wellbeing and intercultural competences were measured before and after the intervention. The intervention consisted of sessions of watching two example movies, Eat Pray Love and Hotel Transylvania 2, and subsequent group discussions about the movies’ respective messages. The participants’ group was formed by 236 university students from Brunei and Romania, ages between 18 and 49years old. The results showed an increase in students’ openness to other cultures and across some of the wellbeing PERMA dimensions. The study makes a theoretical contribution by connecting positive psychology and the intercultural competence constructs and the influences of movies.

How Movie-watching Enhanced Subjective Well-being during the COVID-19 Pandemic? —An Explorative Study Based on the Case of Chinese College Students

“…It has been proven by a number of experiments that the PERMA-Pro ler he proposed has acceptable model t and consistency both internal and cross-temporal. More speci cally, the scale has been widely used to measure the subjective well-being of adolescents and college students [15].…”

Muay Thai, Psychological Well-Being, and Cultivation of Combat-Relevant Affordances

“…Psychological research has also demonstrated that conceptions of "happiness" and "psychological well-being" differ across cultures and change over time [18], making it useful for the purposes of scientific investigation to identify more specific elements of "happiness" or "psychological well-being" rather than treating "happiness" or "psychological well-being" as a singular, invariant, and holistic property [16]. The PERMA framework that Seligman [16] proposed has been incredibly influential in contemporary research on psychological well-being and has been validated and applied in psychological studies of well-being in participants across cultures and in different countries including Australia [19], Brunei [20], Canada [21], China [22], Germany [23], Greece [24], Hong Kong [25], India [26], Italy [27], Japan [28], Qatar [29], Romania [20], South Korea [30], Turkey [31], and the United Arab Emirates [32].…”

“…Interestingly enough, recent research from scholarly dissertations and professional publications in education and sociology suggest that Muay Thai training can in fact contribute to positive emotions. For example, Dimson et al [40] studied young Muay Thai athletes (n = 10, age range [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] and found that Muay Thai training helped to improve their self-esteem and emotional regulation. In another empirical study, Phipps [41] conducted interviews with female Muay Thai athletes (n = 14) and found that most of them experienced pleasurable excitement while training and competing.…”