The Impaction Of Buddhist Identity To Emotional Experience And Psychological Healthy Of Believers

In social life, we human beings have multiple identities, identities are not only the basis of the categories of individuals, but also affecting individuals’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral manifestations. The existing studies concerned about impacts on individuals’ cognitive made by identities, such as in-Group biases and outgroup biases. However, the influence on individual emotions has not previously studied. Especially for Tibetans who believe in Buddhist, under influence of the Buddhist’s thought "Compassion and no self", when negative emotion appears, is there any differences between the way of Buddhists’ perceive himself and others? Under the influence of Buddha’s teachings, whether the Buddhists have higher degree of psychological health? Exploring these problems will be of great significance in explaining how identities influence the behavioral habits, way of doing things and psychological health of Tibetans.This research is divided into two series. Study 1 is on the base of experiments, selecting 40 participants in Tibetans(Buddhists) and Han(non-religious) for each group, and asking the participants to imagine individuals with different identities suffering situations described in experimental pictures, and measuring the subjective emotional experience of the participants. The results showed that, comparing with the participants of Tibetan, participants of Han showed more negative emotional experiences to negative information of in-Group, which is called in-Group bias. While the participants of Tibetans showed negative emotional experiences to negative information of out-Group, which in-Group bias phenomenon reversed. The results also showed that participants of Han and Buddhists have different emotional experience to in-group and out-group. Study 2 adopted the survey methods, 300 undergraduates were selected to be measured by “self-rating scale” and “multireligious identity scale”.Results showed that religious practice had significant negative correlation with self-rating scores, suggesting that religious faith and practices have obviously positive impact on mental health status of religion believers. Through the two studies, and then believing in Buddhism and participating in religious activities, Buddhists can be made more merciful and learn to doing things more indifferently. Thereby putting impact on emotional experience and mental health of both in-Group and out-Group.