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TJU to Open Course on Psychology of Happiness

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“True happiness comes from the identification and utilization of your own advantages, and from your understanding and pursuit of life meanings.” In November 2020, Tianjin University held a series of “Happiness Lectures” to help students “decode” happiness from perspectives of Culture and Happiness, Money and Happiness, Health and Happiness, and Relationship and Happiness.

It is learnt that an optional course about the Psychology of Happiness will be open and available to all students in the spring semester of 2021.

Wang Xiaoling, a faculty from Tianjin University Mental Health Education Center said that since the opening of a compulsory course about Mental Health for College Students in 2015, more students began to pay attention to their mental health and the rate of their willingness to seek psychological help has increased from 49.4% to 81.03%.“Now our center is usually fully booked for psychological counseling. And we became more and more aware of the fact that a sound body doesn’t necessarily represent a sound mind and not being depressed doesn’t mean being happy.”Wang added that the lectures and the happiness course would help enrich and improve the university’s mental health curriculum system which was designed to strengthen students ability to fight off negative emotions and find one’s own happiness. "When a person feels happy, he is less likely to have psychological problems."

Wang fengming, another teacher from the university’s Mental Health Education Center stated that in the wake of the lecture series, the courses about well-being would not only study the nature of happiness, but also lead students to perceive happiness from an interdisciplinary perspective. “After all, well-being is both a psychological issue and a goal that all human beings are pursuing,” Wang said, “What we try to offer through the course is more than the methods and strategies to become happy, but to inspire students to define their own happiness, find a way to it and live a relatively happy life on campus.”

The course about the Psychology of Happiness is reported to integrates positive psychology, clinical psychology, health psychology and traditional Chinese culture. It collects chapters including Health and Happiness, Economy and Happiness, Traditional Culture and Happiness, Relationship and Happiness and so on. Supporting activities were also designed to help students better understand happiness.

In addition to lectures on well-being and the comingcourse on happiness, Tianjin University also offers several other courses and workshops related with mental health improvement, such as Psychology of Love, Improvement of College Student Mental Health and Potential Development, and Peer-Help Education.

By Zhang Huiting

Editor: Eva Yin