Positive psychology in Asian Americans: Theory and research.

Abstract

despite the tremendous advances that positive psychologists have made to our understanding of optimal human functioning, little attention has been paid to the role of culture in shaping these processes (diener, 2000;henrich, heine, & norenzayan, 2010;Tsai & Park, 2014). yet, a growing body of empirical research demonstrates cultural variation in how people think, feel, and relate to others, suggesting that optimal functioning for asian americans and european americans may differ in important ways. Thus, current ways of assessing and increasing well-being, which have been primarily developed in european american contexts, may be only partially applicable to asian americans. In this chapter, we review the research on positive affect, cognitions, and behaviors of asian americans and discuss implications for developing a positive psychology of asian americans. 3We thank Lindsey davis for her research assistance in the preparation of this chapter. We also thank members of the stanford culture and emotion Laboratory and the stanford culture co-laboratory for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.

Racial uplifts and the Asian American experience.

“…In this research, we focus on what has heretofore been a largely neglected countertheme in scientific work on race, ethnicity, and culture—the study of salutary race-related experiences and their relationship to psychological functioning. We advance the concept of racial uplifts , reflecting naturally occurring positive race-related events in everyday life, and extend it to an empirical investigation of Asian Americans, 1 a population notably absent in studies of positive psychology and human flourishing (Bencharit & Tsai, 2016; Yu et al, 2016). Our conceptualization and use of the term racial uplifts is based on research on daily life events, wherein uplifts are defined as positive experiences that are likely to occur in everyday life (Kanner et al, 1981).…”