Humanity

Strengths of humanity

Love

Love has many different definitions ranging from a set of purely biological and chemical processes to a religious concept. As a character strength, love is a mutual feeling between two people characterized by attachment, comfort, and generally positive feelings. It can be broken down into 3 categories: love between a child and their parents, love for your friends, and romantic love. Having love as strength is not about the capacity to love, as such, it is about being involved in a loving relationship.
Love, in the psychological sense, is most often studied in terms of attachment to others. A degree of controversy surrounds defining and researching love in this way, as it takes away the “mystery of love.] Because love is mysterious, to an extent, it is most often studied in terms of attachment theory, because it can be studied in the way across ages. In infants, the attachment is studied through the Strange Situation Test. Attachment to an individual, usually the mother, is determined by how distressed the infant becomes when the mother is taken out of the experimental setting.
Evidence in support of the benefits of love is seen in the negative affect states that result from lacking love. Orphaned children have been targeted in studies about negative attributes resulting from a lack of attachment. Smyke et al. Additionally, individuals who develop securely attached have a lower likelihood of depression, high-self esteem, and less likelihood of divorce.

Kindness

The strength kindness encompasses most related terms that evoke feelings of altruism, generosity, helpfulness and a general desire to help people. Additionally, while gender differences in kindness are statistically significant, they are minimal, and the methods of testing used may not always have construct validity.
Kindness is most often measured on a case by case measure and not usually as a trait. The former, however, only ask about 20 specific altruistic acts, leaving out a wide range of altruistic behaviors.
Social Intelligence

Social intelligence is the most modern of the three strengths associated with humanity. The Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV) psychological assessment defines social intelligence as the ability to understand “relationships with other people, including the social relationships involved in intimacy and trust, persuasion, group membership, and political power. Intelligence has many psychological definitions from Weschler’s intelligence to the various theories of multiple intelligence. The CSV divides intelligence into hot and cold, hot intelligence being that intelligence related to active emotional processes. Additionally, it combines elements of the other two hot bits of intelligence, personal and emotional intelligence. Personal intelligence being the internal counterpart to social intelligence and emotional intelligence being the capacity to understand emotions. The CSV highlights three social intelligence measurement scales: Factor Based Social Intelligence Tasks, Psychological Mindedness Assessment Procedure, and Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional intelligence Test.
Social Intelligence research is limited, however, there is much literature on the characteristics associated with social intelligence. Zaccaro et al. found social intelligence and perceptiveness to be integral to effective leadership; that is, good leaders are “social experts. Emotional intelligence, too, plays a role in leadership. Another study found that emotional intelligence enables leaders to better understand their followers, thereby enhancing their ability to influence them.