Character strengths and virtues
This groundbreaking handbook of character strengths and virtues is the first progress report from a prestigious group of researchers who have undertaken the systematic classification and measurement of widely valued positive traits. They approach good character in terms of separate strengths- authenticity, persistence, kindness, gratitude, hope, humor, and so on- each of which exists in degrees.
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What Hacker News says
- Most recently, I've been keeping Character Strengths and Virtues on my desk. It's a catalogue of the things that we think are good about human psychology. It's a good conversation starter, and fun to flip through and read sections.
- One of the criticisms being leveled at the DSM-V here is that "normal" is being negatively defined as the absence of disorder:
> DSM-5 seems to have no definition of happiness other than the absence of suffering. The normal individual in this book is tranquilized and bovine-eyed, mutely accepting everything in a sometimes painful world without ever feeling much in the way of anything about it.
Positive psychology[1] is a branch of psychology that agrees with this critique, and rather than looking at what goes wrong with people, it looks at what is right about people. There is a book "Character Strengths and Virtues"[2] that is aimed at being the positive counterpart to the DSM, providing a taxonomy of character strengths that have been identified across different times and cultures.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_Strengths_and_Virtues
