The Chinese In The Duke Guan Personality Characteristics And The Research Of Faith

The long-standing Guan Gong belief has become a unique faith with Chinese nationaltraditional culture color. Many scholars including folklorist, sociologist and anthropologist havedone many researches on this faith phenomenon. But in general, they made more intellectualinquiries in literature than empirical researches with much less psychological researches. Afterfinding out the present situation of the research in this area, it is decided to attempt to explain theGuan Gong belief from the view of folk cultural psychology by using empirical methods toenrich the research on Guan Gong belief.Firstly, this paper studied the personality traits of Guan Gong in a popular image andcollected data mainly by using the method of word association and personality adjectivesassessment. Then it came to a conclusion by the content and factor analysis. The results areshown as following:(1)the personality traits of Guan Gong in the popular impression is brave, justice, loyalty,wisdom, forthright, short-tempered, arrogant and so on;(2)95%of the subjects consider thatGuan Gong is a gentleman (M=79.41, SD=13.377),79%believe that Guan Gong is sacred (M=67.15, SD=19.309);(3) The public can see more comprehensive Guan Gong: the advantagesand the shortcomings;(4) Guan Gong’s impressions in the public’s eyes are mainly fromliteratures and films (86%) and folklores (72%).Secondly, people who wore Guan Gong’s image or worshiped him were interviewed. And itused the method of qualitative research to get the profound understanding of the phenomenon GuanGong belief. The results are shown as following:(1) The worship mentality is mainly affected by the worship of Guan Gong’s personality,secular utilitarian pursuit and traditional custom;(2) The worship plays a role of a spiritualcomfort, improvement of personal image and beautification of spaces, improvement of thequality of personal morality and behavior restraints.(3) There are points for attention in theprocess of worshiping Guan Gong;(4) People who worship Guan Gong can have a rationalrecognition for behavior.This paper explains Guan Gong belief from the angle of folk culture psychology. Firstly, itaims at letting public to have a much clearer understanding on this phenomenon of belief andmake them adapt to this kind of phenomenon better, and play a guiding role for their actions;secondly, it can relate the folk culture with psychology closely and provide a new vision anddirection for our research in psychology. It also can contribute to enrich the research field ofpsychology.