New characterizations of plurisubharmonic functions and positivity of direct image sheaves

We give new characterizations of plurisubharmonic functions and Griffiths positivity of holomorphic vector bundles with singular Finsler metrics. As applications, we present a different method to prove plurisubharmonic variation of generalized Bergman kernel metrics and Griffiths positivity of the direct images of twisted relative canonical bundles associated to holomorphic families of K\"ahler manifolds.