The improvement for the spatial-diversity reception technology with the combined effect of atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors based on differential phase shift keying (DPSK) modulation is analyzed and studied. The performance of spatical-diversity reception for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and single input multiple output (SIMO) systems is discussed, and the bit error rate (BER) and outage probability for three types of diversity reception technologies are investigated under different turbulence situations, and the novel closed form expressions of BER and outage probability for free space optical communication(FSO) system are derived with the generalized hypergeometric method. The analysis and experiment results show that the performance of BER can be improved, the outage probability can be degraded with the spatial-diversity reception technology, and channel fading caused by atmospheric turbulence can be effectively improved. With the number of diversity increased, performance of FSO system is improved obviously. Compared with three diversity reception technologies, the maximum ratio combining diversity reception technology is most advantageous.