感恩节特辑 耶鲁校长谈感恩(中英双语)
又是一年感恩节。
与家人围坐桌前，吃着大餐，回顾这一年所得恩惠(count the blessings)，感谢这一年福泽我们的上苍，感谢这一年陪伴、支持、鼓励的人。
这个时候，读读耶鲁大学校长彼得•沙洛维(Peter Salovey)在2014年毕业典礼上的演讲《论感恩》(On Gratitude)，会让我们更能理解我们为何要心怀感恩，并付之于行动。
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President Peter Salovey leads those on the stage and in the audience in a round of applause for the graduates' achievements. (Photo by Michael Marsland)
亲爱的同事、朋友、家人和毕业生们：
欢迎你们的到来，也很荣幸在这个愉快的周末能与大家一起交流。
多年来，我一直以学校工作人员、院长、副校长这些不同的角色参加毕业典礼，而今天是第一次以校长的身份参加。我一直遵从耶鲁大学的传统，今天我愿意将此延续，这一年，我们在纪念旧典礼的同时迎来了新的毕业典礼。
关于感恩，我们知之甚少
在成年后的大部分时期，我一直在研究人类情感。这是我学术生涯的基础，也是我的爱好。尽管关于情感的学术文献数量庞大且不断增长，但令人们吃惊的是，有关感恩的心理学研究文献却相当匮乏。对感恩进行探究的实验很少甚至没有。就孩子们学习说“谢谢你”而进行研究被认为是古怪而又过时的。
众所周知，我们所有人都有自己的想法。感恩意味着什么?尤其是在这样的一个周末，我们更应该去思考这个问题。在10年前，感恩几乎从未出现在心理学家编制的人类情感手册和百科全书中。忽略对感恩的认真研究并不局限于心理学中，例如，亚里士多德就没有把感恩纳入到他那著名的人类美德列表中。
虽然心理学专家忽略了对感恩的研究，但很多哲学家，从西塞罗到塞内加、阿奎奈、斯宾诺莎、霍布斯、休姆，再到康德，都认识到表达感恩的能力不仅是社交礼貌，也是一种核心竞争力。这些哲学家担忧社会的主流价值观会被不懂感恩的人颠覆，这对于普通大众来说是不公平的，因为在这样一种氛围下，整个社会都会走向衰败和毁灭。
事实上，在心理学研究领域，几乎没有人关注感恩，我们对此都没有给予足够的重视。这可能是因为表达感恩的需求使我们意识到并非所有的事情都在我们的掌控之中，或是习惯于受他人恩惠或依赖他人，使我们意识到自己的命运并不完全由我们自己掌握。事实上，我们有时很脆弱。已逝的罗伯特·所罗门是我最喜欢的当代情感哲学家之一，他经常说，感恩是一种令人不安的情感，因为它总促使我们“认识到我们没有一个人是完全独立的，都需要他人的帮助”。感恩促使我们反思作为主体担当者的局限性。
尽管一个人的内心可能充满感恩，但有时表达出来后会让人很不自在。即使向神表达感恩也会使我们感到难为情。比如，我最喜欢的一个乡村音乐歌手在获得格莱美奖项时表达对上帝的无限感激之情，以及当大卫·欧提慈在棒球比赛中爆发时，将球打击出芬威右外场后戏剧性地对着空中挥手(如果在言语和情感上冒犯了洋基队的球迷，我在此表示歉意)。
感恩的人更幸福
然而，生活中真正的幸福快乐与社会中真正的兴旺繁荣，完全有能力驳回绝对自力更生的神话谎言。美好的生活可能遥不可及，除非我们能够培养一种开放的心态接受他人的帮助并表示感激。
在准备致词的过程中，我欣喜地发现，经济学家亚当·斯密首次指出了感恩的重要性，而他却是因强调私利是驱动力的言论而闻名的。亚当·斯密清晰而又合乎逻辑地说，正是激情与情感将社会交织在一起。他认为，情感(比如感激之情)使社会变得更美好、更仁慈、更安全。哪个社会心理学家可以说得比这更好?
毫无疑问，当我们心存感恩时，就很难同时感受到妒忌、愤怒、仇恨等负面情感。事实上，那些说他们会表达感激的人——这些人积极回应调查项目，如“我有时会感恩不起眼的小事情”“我感恩很多人”——往往也会在所谓的主观幸福即生活满意度的心理测试上获得高分。
为什么感恩的人更幸福?
与表达感恩不相容的一种个人倾向是社会比较，尤其是与比我们拥有更多的人相比较的潜在倾向。心怀感恩的人很少会妒忌他人。充满感恩的人能更好地应对生活的压力，具有更强的抵抗力。即使在困境中，他们也能发现美好的东西，其他人也会更喜欢他们。更重要的是，人们更愿意帮助那些过去一直感恩他们的人。正如21世纪伟大的哲学家贾斯汀·汀布莱克所说：“凡事皆有因果”。
感恩是社会和谐的关键
心理学家芭芭拉·弗雷德里克森认为，感恩能够拓展人的思维，换句话说，感恩能让人们考虑更广泛、更具创造力的可能性、选择和替代方式。思维的开拓会产生一种个人智能和自我效能感。弗雷德里克森认为，这些情感能培养同情心与助人为乐的精神，并促使人们尝试一系列可能帮助别人的方法而远非简单的互换互惠或一报还一报。
人们观察到，非人类灵长类动物也会做出这种形为，比如当一只黑猩猩与另一只黑猩猩共同分享食物时，得到食物的黑猩猩会把分享食物的黑猩猩搂在怀里。或者，一只猩猩持续给另一只猩猩梳理毛发一两天后，被梳理毛发的猩猩会与给他梳理毛发的猩猩分享食物。
正如这些例子所暗示的，感恩是社会和谐的关键。的确如此，感恩可以增强人们的社会归属感，增强作为好公民的责任，使人们对善意更忠诚。当今社会需要以多种形式将感恩贯穿于各种文化中。对每个人的贡献表达感恩，从而使社会变得更加和谐、团结。公开表达的及其他各种形式的感恩会使人们保持乐观并有共同目标感。
现在谈谈即将从耶鲁大学毕业的你们，今天你们可能也心存感恩。问题是，你们得到的帮助太多，不可能完全偿还生命里得到的一切。当你们有一天收到很多温暖与祝福时，如果能够记住这些就好了：没有一件伟大的礼物可以被“偿还”，比如受教育的机会。虽然这是你们争取来的，但也是你们收到的礼物。既然你们现在拥有了，以后你们也要为之付出，或者你们把这个礼物以你们收到它的方式传递给下一代。当然，如何去做取决于你们。
美国桂冠诗人比利·柯林斯(Billy Collins)在写给母亲的一首叫做《系带》(The Lanyard)诗中捕获了这些情感。目前，母亲节仅仅过去一周。因此，这首诗很适合在这里读给你们听。
《系带》
日前，我缓缓跃起，
从房间蓝色的墙壁上，
仿佛在水底，由打字机至钢琴，
从书架到地板上的信封，
当发现自己停留在字典的L部分时，
我把视线落在了“系带”上。
一个法国小说家啃过的曲奇，
不可能忽然送回过去，
那时我坐在野营的工作台，
靠近深深的阿迪朗达克湖，
学习如何编织细长的塑料条，
编成一条系带，送给母亲做礼物。
我从未见有谁用过系带，
或者佩戴，如果可以这样使用，
但这并没有阻止我，
一股压一股，一遍又一遍地编，
直到做成一个四四方方的，
红白相间的挂绳，给我的母亲。
她给我生命和乳汁，
我给她一条系带，
难忍的病房，她悉心照料着我，
举起汤匙，喂药到我嘴边，
冰凉方巾，敷我额头，
然后，带我走进轻而薄的光明。
教我走路，带我游泳，
而我，送她一条系带。
她说，这里有数不尽的饭菜，
这里有衣服和优质的教育。
我回答说，这是送你的系带。
在一位参谋的小小帮助下，我完成了它。
这里有活着的躯体，有跳动的心，
有强壮的双腿，强健的骨骼和坚固的牙齿，
还有可以了解世界的清澈双眸，她低语道。
我说，这是我在营地做的丝带。
此时此刻，我想告诉她，
这是一个小小礼物——微不足道。
你永远无法报答你的母亲，
我悲哀地承认，当她接过我手中双色的系带时，
我像个孩子一样肯定无疑，
打发无聊而编织的这个无用的东西，
却足以使我们扯平。
毕业生们，我不是要你们必须感谢母亲。尽管这并不是一个坏主意，但你们至少应该为此花上些许时间。尽管这个周末很喧嚣，还是请大家静下来想想所有帮助你们走到今天的人，那些你们无法报答的人。他们可能是家人、朋友、敬爱的师长，甚至是你们从未谋面的作者。想想他们，借此机会，轻声说句“谢谢”。正如20世记早期耶鲁大学的杰出英语教授威廉·里昂·菲尔普斯曾经写到的：“感恩带来幸福，给予越多，得到的就越多”。
On Gratitude: 2014 Baccalaureate Address by President Peter Salovey
May 18, 2014
In his first Baccalaureate Address, President Peter Salovey urged the graduates to consider the benefits of gratitude. Here is the text of his speech.
Colleagues, friends, families, graduating seniors: It is a pleasure to greet you today and offer a few words on this celebratory weekend.
Over the years, I have participated in the baccalaureate service in various roles — as a member of the faculty, as a dean, as provost, and now, for the first time, as president. There is a Yale tradition that I have observed that I would like to continue today, during a year in which we have introduced new rituals while also honoring old ones:
Might I ask all of the families and friends here today to rise and recognize the outstanding — and graduating — members of the Class of 2014?
And now, might I ask the Class of 2014 to consider all those who have supported your arrival at this milestone, and to please rise and recognize them?
Thank you! I delight in this custom not merely because it is lovely in its own right, but also because my baccalaureate remarks today focus on gratitude. I talk about gratitude in part because I am so thankful for the dedicated leadership of Yale College that Dean Miller has provided since December 2008, and in part because gratitude turns out to be one of the keys to happiness.
For most of my adult life, I have been a student of human emotion. It is the basis for my academic career and one of the passions of my professional life. And although there is a large — and growing — body of scholarly literature on emotion, it might surprise you that the psychological literature on gratitude is rather meager. Laboratory experiments exploring gratitude are few and far between. Field studies of how children learn to say “thank you” are viewed as quaint and old-fashioned.
We all know — all of us in our own minds — what it means to be grateful, particularly on a weekend like this one. But until the last decade, gratitude almost never appeared in handbooks and encyclopedias of human emotions compiled by psychologists. And the neglect of serious consideration of gratitude is not limited to psychology: Aristotle, for example, did not include it on his famous list of human virtues.
But even if psychology and Aristotle have neglected gratitude, many philosophers — from Cicero to Seneca to Aquinas to Spinoza to Hobbs to Hume and Kant — acknowledge that the ability to express gratitude is not just socially polite but also a core human capacity. These philosophers worry that societies characterized by ungrateful people — by ingrates — might be unjust and unfair, and turn to vengeance and destruction.
The fact that there has been so little attention paid to gratitude in my field of psychology — the fact that you and I might not pay enough attention to it — could be because the need to express gratitude reminds us that we are not entirely in control; that we might be indebted or dependent; that our destiny is not entirely in our hands; indeed, that on occasion we are vulnerable. As one of my favorite contemporary philosophers of emotion, the late Robert Solomon, liked to say, gratitude is an uncomfortable emotion because it forces us to “recognize that none of us is wholly self-sufficient and without the need of help from others.”[1] Gratitude forces us to reflect on the limits to our sense of agency.
Although one’s heart might be filled with gratitude, expressing it may sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable. Even gratitude toward a higher power can make us squirm if it seems over-the-top, as when one of my favorite country music singers thanks the Lord for providing him with a Grammy award, or even when Big Papi dramatically points toward the heavens after blasting a homer over the right-field wall in Fenway Park. (I offer my apologies to any Yankees fans out there for summoning up that image.)
And yet, true happiness in life, and true health in society, may not be possible without the capacity to reject the myth of total self-reliance. The good life may be out of reach unless we are able to cultivate an openness to accepting help from others and expressing gratitude for that help.
In the course of preparing this address, I was thrilled to discover that none other than Adam Smith, an economist known best for his focus on the importance of self-interest as a motivating force, was one of the first social scientists to point out the importance of gratitude![2] Smith clearly and cogently observed that passions and emotions are what knit a society together. Sentiments like gratitude, Smith argued, make the social world better — more benevolent and more secure. A social psychologist could not have said it better!
There is no doubt that when we experience gratitude, it is difficult to feel negative emotions like envy, anger, or hatred at the same time. In fact, people who report that they express a lot of gratitude — people who respond positively to survey items like “I sometimes feel grateful for the smallest things,” and “I am grateful to a wide variety of people” — also tend to score high on psychological measures of what is called subjective well-being, that is, satisfaction with their lives.[3]
Why might this be? Well, one human tendency that is incompatible with expressing gratitude is social comparison, especially the insidious tendency to compare ourselves with those who have more than we do. It appears that people who feel gratitude are less likely to envy others, and thus they avoid an emotion that can be quite corrosive. Moreover, grateful people seem far more able to cope with the stresses and strains of life; they are more resilient because they find the good even in difficult circumstances, and other people like them better. What’s more: people are more willing to come to the assistance of others who have expressed gratitude toward them in the past.[4] To quote that great 21st-century philosopher, Justin Timberlake: “What goes around … comes all the way back around.”[5]
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson argues that feelings of gratitude broaden one’s mind — that is, they allow you to consider a wider and more creative array of possibilities, options, and alternative courses of action.[6] This broadening of the mind produces a sense of personal resourcefulness and self-efficacy. Fredrickson contends that these feelings foster a desire to empathize with and help other people, and to consider a wider array of potential ways to be helpful that go far beyond simple reciprocity, or tit-for-tat.
The origins of this sort of behavior even can be observed in non-human primates like chimpanzees — when one chimp shares food with another chimp, and the chimp who received the food throws his arms around the food-sharing chimp in a warm hug. Or, when one chimp grooms another chimp and then a day or two later, the recipient of the grooming shares food with the groomer.[7]
You probably think I got all this from watching “The Lion King,” but as these examples suggest, gratitude might be a key to social harmony. Indeed, gratitude may strengthen one’s sense of belonging to a community, of obligations to being a good citizen, and of loyalty to the greater good. Perhaps this social reinforcement is why gratitude seems to be observed in various forms across all cultures. Communities in which gratitude is expressed publicly become knitted together through a shared sense of appreciation for everyone’s contributions. Public ceremonies and other displays of gratitude encourage a kind of optimism and a shared sense of purpose.
So, let’s get back to talking about you, soon-to-be graduates of Yale College: You are likely feeling gratitude today. The trouble is, you owe so much to others that you can never fully repay them for the great things you receive in life. And on a day when you are receiving so much, so much warmth, so many congratulations, it is always good to remember that no great gift you have been given — the opportunity for an education, which you earned but also received — (no truly great gift) can ever be “repaid.” Instead, it must be paid forward, and it is up to you to pass this gift on to others in the next generation in the same way you received it.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins captures these feelings in a poem written for his mother called “The Lanyard.” And, because Mother’s Day was only a week ago, it seems appropriate to read it to you on this occasion:
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly —
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift — not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.*
And so seniors, my message today is not “you need to thank your mothers” — although that would not be such a bad idea — but rather that you should spend at least a few moments — in spite of all the hoopla this weekend — thinking about all of those individuals who helped you get to this moment in your lives, all those individuals who you can never repay. They might be family members and friends, beloved teachers and mentors, or even authors whom you have never met. But think about them, and, when the moment is right, say a quiet “thank you.” As William Lyon Phelps, a distinguished professor of English at Yale in the early part of the 20th century, once wrote, “… gratitude begets happiness … the more one gives, the more one has left.”[8]
Congratulations! We are delighted to salute your accomplishments. We are overjoyed to celebrate with you. We are proud of your achievements. Remember to give thanks for all that has brought you to this day. And go forth from this place with grateful hearts, paying back the gift you have received here by paying it forward for others.
* “The Lanyard,” Billy Collins, from “The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems,” 2007, Random House Trade Paperbacks. Used with permission of the author.
[1] Solomon, R.C. (2004). Foreword. In R.A. Emmons & M.E. McCullough (Eds.), “The psychology of gratitude.” Oxford: Oxford University Press (p. vii).
[2] Smith, A. (1790/1976). “The theory of moral sentiments” (6th edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[3] McCullough, M.E., Emmons, R.A., & Tsang, J. (2002). “The grateful disposition: A conceptual and empirical topography.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82,112-127.
[4] For a systematic review of this literature, see Watkins, P.C. (2004). “Gratitude and subjective well-being.” In R.A. Emmons & M.E. McCullough (eds.), “The psychology of gratitude.” Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[5] Timberlake, J., Mosley, T., & Hills, N. (2006). “What Goes Around … Comes Around.” Jive/Zomba Records.
[6] Fredrickson, B.L. (2004). “Gratitude, like other emotions, broadens and builds.” In R.A. Emmons & M.E. McCullough (eds.), “The psychology of gratitude.” Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[7] Behaviors of this kind have been described by Frans de Waal in many of his writings. See, for example, de Waal, F.B.M. (1997). “The chimpanzee’s service economy: Food for grooming.” Evolution and Human Behavior, 18, 375-386.
[8] Phelps, W.L. (1932). “Appreciation.” New York: E.P. Dutton, p. 23.
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《感恩节特辑 耶鲁校长谈感恩(中英双语)》出自：百味书屋
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