Gratitude and Well-Being

Philip C. Watkins
Eastern Washington University

Content
This chapter attempts to review the research that speaks to the relationship between gratitude and well-being. Considerable evidence shows that gratitude is associated with emotional and social well-being, and experimental work has provided promising evidence that gratitude causes enhancements in well-being. I propose that gratitude supports well-being because it amplifies the good in one’s life.

Gratitude and Well-Being Gratitude is the most pleasant of virtues, though not the easiest…. Gratitude is a mystery, not because of the pleasure it affords us but because of the obstacles we must overcome to feel it. It is the most pleasant of virtues and the most virtuous of pleasures. -Comte-Sponville (2002), p. 132

At a recent convention a colleague asked me, “Why is gratitude so great?” His question came about while discussing the many virtues that seem to result from gratitude (Watkins, 2004; Watkins, Van Gelder & Frias, 2009; Wood, Froh & Geraghty, 2010). In this chapter I will seek to answer this important question. In pursuing this goal I will first attempt to define gratitude and I will present several ways of assessing this emotion and virtue. I will then review the research that speaks to the issue of whether gratitude is all that “great.” Third, I will explore the “how” of gratitude; I will suggest several mechanisms that might help explain how gratitude appears to enhance well-being. I will then submit practical suggestions for how clinicians, coaches, and individuals might use the gratitude literature to enhance well-being, and finally, I will present an analogical theory that I believe helps explain, “Why gratitude is so great.” To anticipate, I shall argue that gratitude acts as an amplifier of the good in one’s life (Watkins, 2008).

Foundations of Gratitude In order to understand how gratitude contributes to well-being it is first important to clearly define gratitude. In this section I will try to define gratitude and I will also offer several ways of assessing this construct. I offer the following definition: “An individual experiences the emotion of gratitude (i.e., state gratitude) when they affirm that something good has happened to them, and they recognize that someone else is largely responsible for this benefit” (Watkins et al., 2009, p. 438, derived from Emmons, 2004). In this definition I take a broad view of “something good.” In other words, the benefit need not take place at any particular point of time. For example, when one recognizes and appreciates the value of being alive, they are likely to experience gratitude. Furthermore, the benefit may simply be the awareness that something bad could have happened, but did not (e.g., when one’s plane lands safely in the midst of a lightening storm, they may feel grateful). One somewhat controversial aspect of this definition is that the source of the benefit is some personalized external source. The source may not be human (e.g., God), but in some way at least at an implicit level the beneficiary feels that they have been intentionally favored. While not all gratitude researchers would agree with this aspect of my definition, virtually all include the importance of attributing the benefit to an outside source. To comprehend the nature of gratitude it is important to understand its function. Following Adam Smith (1790/1976), McCullough and colleagues (2001) have argued convincingly that gratitude may be seen as a moral affect. They proposed that gratitude serves as a “moral barometer” (it tells the beneficiary that the moral climate has changed in her favor—someone has benefited her), a “moral motivator” (it encourages prosocial behavior), and a “moral reinforcer” (when someone expresses gratitude it encourages their benefactors to act favorably toward them in the future). This understanding of gratitude has been helpful to understanding how gratitude contributes to well-being. How can one assess the emotion of gratitude? It appears that a simple but effective way of measuring the state of gratitude is to have individuals respond to three adjectives on a Likert type scale (grateful, thankful, and appreciative; McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002). Although early researchers tended to equate the emotion of gratitude with indebtedness (feeling obligated to repay), recent research has shown that these are distinct states. For example, in two studies we were able to dissociate gratitude from indebtedness (Watkins, Scheer, Ovnicek, & Kolts 2006). We found that as the benefactor’s expectations of reciprocity increased, gratitude in the beneficiary decreased, but indebtedness increased. In addition, the thought/action tendencies of gratitude were distinct from that of indebtedness (see also Algoe & Gable, 2010; Algoe, Haidt, & Gable, 2008; Tsang, 2006). Mathews and Green (2010) demonstrated another important difference between gratitude and indebtedness. They found that indebtedness was positively associated with self-focus, but gratitude showed an inverse relationship with self-consciousness. In a follow-up study, experimentally induced self-conscious individuals recalled benefit memories with more indebtedness than did controls. Thus, indebtedness appears to involve more self-consciousness than does gratitude. Moreover, we have found that while trait gratitude is positively correlated with subjective well-being, indebtedness is negatively correlated with several well-being measures (Van Gelder, Ruge, Frias, & Watkins, 2007). In this study we also found that indebtedness was inversely associated with gratitude. Thus, it is possible that the tendency to experience indebtedness may actually inhibit the likelihood of gratitude. Taken together, research has supported the poignant observation of Comte-Sponville (2002, p. 137), “Life is not a debt: life is a state of grace, and being is a state of grace; therein lies gratitude’s highest lesson.” As with other emotions, it is important to determine whether one is analyzing gratitude at the level of emotional state, or affective trait (Rosenberg, 1998). Up to this point, I have described the emotional state of gratitude. However, it is also important to consider gratitude as an affective trait. Trait gratitude refers to one’s capacity for gratitude. If an individual is high in trait gratitude, then they should experience gratitude more easily, more frequently, and from a wider diversity of sources than one who is not a grateful person. The disposition of gratitude more closely approximates what we mean when we discuss the virtue of gratitude. To my knowledge there are four well-developed measures of dispositional gratitude. McCullough et al. (2002) developed the GQ-6, a short but reliable measure of trait gratitude. The GRAT (Watkins, Woodward, Stone, & Kolts, 2003) is a longer measure that attempts to assess three lower order characteristics of the grateful person. We have proposed (with some support) that grateful individuals should have a sense of abundance (or negatively, a lack of a sense of deprivation), a sense of simple appreciation (they appreciate the day-to-day pleasures available to most individuals), and an appreciation of others. Both the GRAT and the GQ-6 appear to have excellent psychometrics, and more recently we have developed a revised version of the GRAT and a shorter 16-item version, that offer several improvements over the original (Thomas & Watkins, 2003; see also Diessner & Lewis, 2007). Recently the GQ-6 and the GRAT have been shown to be effective assessments in younger populations (Froh, Fan, Emmons, Bono, Huebner, & Watkins, in press). While both of these measures were valid with adolescents, the GQ-6 is probably the preferable measure to use with preadolescent children. A third reliable gratitude measure that probably assesses gratitude at the trait level would be the gratitude subscale of the Values in Action Scale (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). If one were interested in assessing gratitude in the context of other virtues, this scale would appear to be ideal. A fourth measure assesses appreciation more generally (Adler & Fagley, 2005), and recent research has shown that this factor does not appear to be distinct from dispositional gratitude (Wood, Maltby, Stewart, & Joseph, 2008).

The Benefits of Gratitude Before I attempt to explain “why gratitude is so great”, I first need to establish that indeed, gratitude has considerable benefits. Most gratitude researchers have operated from the premise that gratitude is important to the good life, specifically, that gratitude enhances happiness. Hence, early research asked the question, “Are grateful people happy people?” Correlations of trait gratitude with emotional well-being confirmed that grateful people do tend to be happy people. Both the GQ-6 and the GRAT show moderate to strong relationships with happiness measures (McCullough et al., 2002; Watkins et al., 2003). Furthermore, Park, Peterson, and Seligman (2004) found that of the 24 Values in Action strengths, gratitude fell behind only hope and zest in predicting subjective well-being. More recently, we have found that trait gratitude predicts increased happiness one month later (Spangler, Webber, Xiong, & Watkins, 2008). It has been known that personality traits are much stronger predictors of happiness than demographic variables (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). Thus, several studies have compared trait gratitude with other well established personality predictors of happiness (McComb, Watkins, & Kolts, 2004; McCullough et al., 2002; Wood, Joseph, & Maltby, 2008). In each case, gratitude predicted happiness above and beyond Big-5 traits, and gratitude was shown to be the strongest trait predictor of happiness. This pattern of results appears to hold with informant reports as well (McCullough et al., 2002). Not only is gratitude strongly positively associated with various aspects of emotional well-being, it is also negatively correlated with several components of ill-being. For example, Watkins et al. (2003) found that trait gratitude was inversely associated with hostility, irritability, negative affect, and depression. In fact, in Study 3 the GRAT correlated with depression symptoms at r=-.72. Other studies have also demonstrated that of all ill-being measures, depression is most strongly and reliably correlated with trait gratitude (for a review see Wood et al., 2010). In two important studies, Wood, Maltby, Gillett, Linley, and Joseph (2007) found that gratitude prospectively predicted decreased stress and depression. Thus, correlational data supports the theory that gratitude promotes emotional well-being, but also may inhibit emotional disorder. New evidence suggests that gratitude may support physical as well as emotional well-being. For example, Wood, Joseph, Lloyd and Atkins (2009) found evidence that gratitude was associated with better subjective sleep quality, longer sleep duration, and decreased sleep latency. In another interesting study, Krause (2006) found that gratitude toward God buffered the effects of stress on the health of elders. In a study with transplant recipients (Grenier, Emmons, & Ivie, 2007), gratitude was correlated with several measures of quality of life. For example, daily gratitude feelings correlated positively with vitality and general health. Although research on the impact of gratitude on health is still in its infancy, later I will discuss experimental studies that provide more conclusive evidence that gratitude benefits health. In sum, a number of studies have shown that gratitude is associated with both emotional and physical health. These studies support the theory that gratitude enhances well-being. The correlational nature of these results however, leaves the question of causation open. For example, an alternative explanation of these findings might be that gratitude is simply the happy consequence of being happy. Fortunately, several experimental studies have added credence to the idea that gratitude actually causes happiness. In two studies, we found that gratitude manipulations enhanced mood state (Watkins et al., 2003, Studies 3 and 4). In three studies, Emmons and McCullough (2003) found that a simple practice of counting one’s blessings enhanced several subjective well-being variables compared to control conditions. Froh and colleagues found that this intervention was also effective with adolescents (Froh, Sefick, & Emmons, 2008; see also Froh, Kashdan, Ozimkowski, & Miller, 2009). Recently, Froh et al. (under review) have shown in two studies that gratitude interventions can be effective with even younger children (aged 8 to 11). Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade (2005) also found that a counting blessings intervention can enhance subjective well-being, but with one important caveat. They found that more is not necessarily better when it comes to counting your blessings. Individuals who counted their blessings once a week showed more improvement in life satisfaction than did those who engaged in this practice three times per week. The “three good things” intervention tested by Seligman, Steen, Park, and Peterson (2005) may also be viewed as a “counting blessings” intervention. In this treatment participants recalled and wrote about recent things that “went well” every night for one week. I submit (as do others; Wood et al., 2010) that most of these “good things” were also things that the participants were grateful for. What was impressive about this intervention is the long-term impact. The emotional well-being of the subjects (increased happiness and decreased depression) continued to rise well after the end of the active treatment phase (at least six months). In a unique study testing the effects of a gratitude intervention on body satisfaction (Geraghty, Wood, & Hyland, 2010a), a gratitude counting blessings intervention decreased body dissatisfaction as well as a cognitive intervention that was specifically targeted to body image cognitions. Both of these treatments did significantly better than a waitlist control group. Interestingly, those in the gratitude group were half as likely to drop out of the treatment than those in the cognitive treatment. Various suggestions have been made in the literature that gratitude interventions may be important to the treatment of eating disorders, and because body image issues are important to bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa, this study provides some preliminary support for these suggestions. In a similar study, Geraghty, Wood and Hyland (2010b) found that their gratitude treatment reduced worry just as much as a cognitive treatment, and both treatments outperformed a waitlist control. These studies provide some evidence that gratitude interventions may have value in treating clinical populations. Perhaps one of the most powerful gratitude interventions to date is the treatment investigated by Seligman et al. (2005). In this intervention an individual expressed gratitude to a person they felt had benefited them but they had “not properly thanked” (p. 416). This intervention resulted in strong increases in happiness and decreases in depression compared to the placebo group. In fact, the immediate impact of this intervention was superior to the other positive psychology interventions that were investigated. Although significant treatment gains were maintained one-month post-intervention, by six months happiness and depression scores had returned to baseline. While the temporality of this gratitude intervention might seem discouraging, we should not expect one expression of gratitude to result in permanent increases in happiness. Given that this treatment involved essentially one gratitude expression, the enhancements in well-being that were observed seems impressive. These studies show promising evidence that gratitude actually causes enhanced emotional well-being. However, as Wood et al. (2010) have pointed out, in several of these studies the gratitude intervention reliably outperformed a control group that recorded their “hassles.” The problem here is that it could be that counting hassles actually decreases well-being, and thus we cannot be certain that gratitude is enhancing well-being just because it outperforms this comparison group. However, even in studies where recording hassles was the “control” group, means of outcome variables showed increases in well-being from pre to posttest. Not only is there promising evidence that gratitude interventions can enhance emotional well-being, a few recent experimental studies have provided support for the theory that gratitude may enhance physical well-being as well. For example, Grenier et al. (2007) found that transplant recipients who completed a gratitude intervention reported better mental health, enhanced general health, and more vitality than transplant recipients in a control group. The effect on vitality is of particular interest, as results from several intervention studies suggest that reflecting on one’s benefits may be invigorating (e.g., Emmons & McCullough, 2003). Furthermore, several of the outcome variables in the experimental studies conducted by Emmons and McCullough (2003) were health related. For example, in Study 1 participants in the counting blessing treatment actually exercised significantly more than those in the comparison conditions. In sum, experimental studies provide encouraging evidence that gratitude and well-being are not merely associated, but that gratitude actually causes enhanced well-being. However, as Wood et al. have warned (2010), a few intervention studies have failed to find a significant impact from their gratitude intervention, and other studies have used “control groups” that actually might have decreased well-being. Furthermore, these studies have little to say about how gratitude enhances well-being. I now turn to this issue.

The How of Gratitude How does gratitude enhance well-being? In order to use gratitude interventions effectively, it is important to understand the potential mechanisms whereby these treatments exert their effect. Although few research studies have directly addressed this question, I would like to outline several theoretical proposals that might help explain how gratitude enhances happiness. First, I submit that gratitude supports well-being by enhancing one’s experience of positive events (see also Wood et al., 2010). In his struggle to understand praise, C. S. Lewis observed, I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete until it is expressed. (1958, p. 95)
Given that praise is usually an expression of gratitude, Lewis makes a compelling argument that experiencing and expressing gratitude actually enhances our enjoyment of a favor. Similarly, Comte-Sponville (2002, p. 132) concluded: Gratitude is a second pleasure, one that prolongs the pleasure that precedes and occasions it, like a joyful echo of the joy we feel, a further happiness for the happiness we have been given. Gratitude: the pleasure of receiving, the joy of being joyful.
Thus, one way that gratitude enhances happiness might be through increasing one’s enjoyment of benefits. This should increase the frequency of positive affect, and thus enhance overall subjective well-being. Although this mechanism seems to be a likely candidate for explaining the gratitude/happiness connection, very few studies have directly investigated this notion. Do “Goods look better when they look like gifts” (Chesterton, 1924/1989, p. 78)? This would appear to be a fruitful question for future research. Not only might gratitude enhance one’s positive experience of the present, it may also enhance one’s appreciation and awareness of the good in one’s life while directing attention away from those benefits that they lack. Thus, gratitude might prevent the unpleasant emotional states that tend to arise from upward social comparisons. Indeed, trait envy and materialism are negatively associated with trait gratitude (McCullough et al., 2002), so gratitude could also support well-being by inhibiting these traits that tend to degrade one’s happiness. Gratitude may enhance our enjoyment of the present, but it may also enhance one’s enjoyment of the past. I propose that gratitude supports happiness by enhancing the enjoyment and accessibility of positive memories. C. S. Lewis (1996, p. 73) wrote, “A pleasure is only full grown when it is remembered.” Several studies have found that happy people are more able to recall pleasant events from their past (e.g., Seidlitz & Diener, 1993). Memory processes should be important to gratitude as well. I propose that encoding and reflecting on pleasant events in a grateful manner should enhance a positive memory bias, which in turn should support one’s happiness. Some evidence supports this idea. In several studies, we have found that gratitude is associated with a positive memory bias (Watkins, Grimm, & Kolts, 2004). Not only are grateful individuals able to remember more pleasant events than their less grateful counterparts, recollecting both positive and negative memories has a more positive emotional impact on grateful than less grateful people. Moreover, we have found that trait gratitude predicts positive memory bias one month later, and this relationship was found to be independent of depression, positive affect, and happiness (Watkins, Van Gelder, & Maleki, 2006). Although these results are promising, experimental work would more directly address our notion that grateful processing enhances the accessibility of positive memories. In sum, grateful people appear to reflect more favorably on their past, and easily retrievable positive memories should enhance one’s emotional well-being. Perhaps the words of Comte-Sponville (2002, p. 137) best encapsulate how gratitude enhances well-being through positive recollections: “The wise man…takes delight in living and also rejoices in having lived. Gratitude (charis) is this joy of memory, this love of the past—it neither suffers over what no longer is nor regrets what has been but joyfully recalls what was.” If gratitude actually enhances a positive memory bias, gratitude also may support happiness by mitigating depression (Wood et al., 2008). Depression is associated with a negativistic memory bias, and having a ready collection of positive memories may help reverse the mood and memory vicious cycle in depression (Watkins, Grimm, Whitney, & Brown, 2005). This relates to the third mechanism whereby gratitude might enhance well-being: gratitude may encourage adaptive coping. Indeed, several studies have found that grateful individuals seem to be particularly good at coping with difficult events (e.g., Kashdan, Uswatte, & Julian, 2005; Wood, Joseph, & Linley, 2007). Gratitude for God also appears to be a buffer for the impact of stress on illness in elders (Krause, 2006). Moreover, the unpleasantness of negative memories tends to fade faster for grateful than for less grateful individuals (Watkins et al., 2004). It is possible that gratitude assists individuals in finding positive consequences from difficult experiences, enabling them to fit these events into a positive, meaningful life story. Although the aforementioned studies are all descriptive, recently we conducted an experimental study that provided some support for this theory (Watkins, Cruz, Holben, & Kolts, 2008). We found that grateful processing of painful memories produced several beneficial consequences. Grateful journaling about this difficult event brought more psychological closure to the memory, decreased unpleasant affect associated with the memory, and decreased the intrusiveness of these recollections compared to comparison journaling conditions. The fourth putative gratitude/happiness mechanism might provide one of the strongest explanations for how gratitude enhances well-being (Diner, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). Social support appears to be one of the most important factors that promotes happiness. Gratitude may enhance well-being by encouraging relationships and social support. Indeed, a number of studies provide support for this mechanism (see Wood et al., 2010, for a comprehensive review). For example, informants see grateful people as more likeable (Watkins, Martin, & Falkner, 2003), and grateful expressions engender more social reward (McCullough et al., 2001). Recent evidence supports the theory that gratitude enhances social bonding (Algoe, Haidt, & Gable, 2008). For example, Algoe and Gable found that gratitude expressed in romantic relationships predicted increased relationship connection and satisfaction the next day for both benefactor and beneficiary (see also Lambert, Clark, Durtschi, Fincham, & Graham, 2010). In a similar study, Froh, Bono, and Emmons found that in adolescents, gratitude prospectively predicted increased social integration. Furthermore, several experiments have shown that gratitude promotes prosocial behavior. We found that gratitude is associated with prosocial action tendencies, while inhibiting antisocial urges (Watkins et al., 2006). In two studies Bartlett and DeSteno (2006) found that gratitude inductions enhanced an individual’s likelihood to engage in prosocial behavior toward a benefactor or a stranger, even when the task was unpleasant. In a series of studies Dunn and Schweitzer (2005) showed that experimental inductions of gratitude enhanced trust. Gino and Schweitzer (2008) not only found that induced gratitude encouraged trust, those in the gratitude condition were more receptive of advice than those in the neutral and anger conditions. Because trust is an important quality in healthy relationships, I believe this finding has implications for how gratitude might enhance happiness through supportive relationships. In sum, a number of studies support the proposition that gratitude enhances happiness by supporting one’s social well-being. Clearly, gratitude is a prosocial trait.

The Application of Gratitude The science of gratitude has emerged out of its infancy, and in its adolescence I believe that the field has developed to the place where we can now apply these findings to enhance people’s well-being. In this section I will review some of the more successful gratitude interventions in specific detail, with an eye to showing how they may be used in applied settings. Clearly, the gratitude treatment that has undergone most scrutiny is the “counting blessings” approach developed by Emmons and McCullough (2003). In this technique individuals are given these specific instructions (p. 379): There are many things in our lives, both large and small, that we might be grateful about. Think back over the past week and write down on the lines below up to five things in your life that you are grateful or thankful for.
There are several aspects of these instructions that are worth noting. First, note that Emmons and McCullough have reminded the participant in a subtle way to take note of “small” as well as “large” blessings. I believe this is important. Grateful people take note of “simple pleasures” as well as large favors (Watkins et al., 2003). “Small” favors occur much more frequently than large blessings, and because intensity is not as important to subjective well-being as the sheer number of positive affective experiences, it is important to remind participants that “small” favors are important to recount. The number of blessings one is to “count” may be an issue as well. The instruction to recall “up to five things” may be important, because it does not require the participant to list five things. Requiring a certain number of blessings to list may put some participants in the awkward position of listing “blessings” that they do not really perceive as blessings. Some have changed the instructions to suggest recounting six blessings (e.g., Geraghty, et al., 2010a; Geraghty, et al., 2010b), but there is reason to suspect that requiring participants to recall too many blessings within a given session may actually work against the procedure. Lyubomirsky and colleagues’ finding (2005) reminds us that more is not necessarily better with regard to counting one’s blessings. Asking a participant to recall too many blessings may actually encourage them to “count” things that they are not actually grateful for, and it may turn the exercise into more of a chore. Anecdotally, in gratitude listing studies that I have conducted participants have reported that they became frustrated with having to recall too many blessings. Other subjects have simply resorted to “counting” the same five things over and over again (e.g., “husband, children, school”). Secondly, the availability or ease of retrieval heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) suggests that asking participants to recall too many blessings might actually lead to lowered satisfaction with life. For example, people tend to report that they are more assertive when asked to recall six incidents of assertiveness than when asked to recall twelve (Schwarz et al., 1991). This is because the participant experiences more retrieval effort when recalling twelve than six, and thus concludes that incidents of assertiveness are less frequent, which in turn leads to lower judgments of assertiveness. Presumably, if one were asked to recall 12 grateful incidents from the past week, this might lead to a similar frustration: participants find difficulty in recalling that many events and thus conclude that they do not have frequent blessings in their life. On the other hand, one could argue that by recalling more grateful incidents they are enhancing the accessibility of more grateful memories, which should in turn lead to greater subjective well-being. Whatever the case, this is certainly a question for future studies to investigate, and it would seem prudent for clinicians, coaches, and consumers to carefully consider the optimal length of gratitude lists. The time of the day at which one engages in gratitude listing exercises may also be of importance. Most counting blessings interventions have instructed participants to complete their gratitude lists at the end of the day—presumably close to when one goes to sleep for the night. Because of the surprising health benefits of gratitude treatments, some have suggested that one mechanism that explains how gratitude interventions impact well-being is by improving sleep. Indeed, there is some evidence that counting blessing interventions do improve the quality of sleep, and they appear to do so by beneficially impacting pre-sleep cognitions (Wood et al., 2009). More research might be directed toward this issue, but evidence to date suggests that counting one’s blessings in the evening might provide the most benefit. In a similar intervention, we (Watkins et al., 2003) asked participants to focus on one person for which they were grateful, rather than listing a number of different blessings. We simply asked our participants to think (or write) about someone living for whom they felt grateful for three minutes. This intervention produced significant increases in positive affect, but the thinking intervention appeared to produce a greater impact than writing. In fact, there is some evidence that writing puts one into a more analytic frame of mind than does simply thinking about something positive, and this analytic mind set appears to degrade positive affect (Lyubomirsky, Sousa, & Dickerhoof, 2006). While more research needs to specifically target this issue, clinicians, coaches, and individuals may want to consider gratitude interventions that would not require writing, and this might be a good way to vary counting blessings exercises so as to keep them more novel and intentional. Seligman et al.’s (2005) “Three good things in life” positive psychology treatment may also be considered as a gratitude listing intervention. In pilot studies we have found that most of the events that people list in this exercise are those for which they feel grateful. In this exercise participants are asked to list “three things that well the previous day” (p. 416). Participants are also encouraged to write about why these things went well. Participants complete this task each day for one week. Although the initial impact of this intervention appears to be somewhat subtle, the long-term impact on well-being is impressive. In fact, participants’ subjective well-being continues to grow well after the intervention period. In an ongoing study we have modified this treatment to make it more explicitly a gratitude exercise. After listing their three good things, participants are encouraged to “take some time to write about how this particular experience or event made you feel grateful.” It remains to be seen whether this is a helpful adaptation. There is good reason to believe that the “three good things in life” intervention might be particularly effective in the treatment of depression. Many individuals suffering from depression have trouble noticing and appreciating positive events in their life, and presumably this treatment would help correct this deficit. Indeed, not only did Seligman and colleagues (2005) find that this treatment enhanced happiness, depression symptoms decreased in a complimentary fashion. As stated earlier, to date one of the most immediately effective interventions to boost well-being has been the “gratitude visit” (Seligman et al., 2005). In this treatment participants were to “write and then deliver a letter of gratitude in person to someone who had been especially kind to them but had never been properly thanked” (p. 416). The actual instructions used by Froh, et al. (2009) might be particularly helpful for those interested in using this intervention: Most everyone enjoys thanks for a job well done or for a favor done for a friend, and most of us remember to say “thank you” to others. But sometimes our “thank-you” is said so casually or quickly that it is nearly meaningless. In this exercise, you will have the opportunity to express your gratitude in a very thoughtful manner. Think of the people—parents, friends, coaches, teammates, and so on—who have been especially kind to you but whom you have never properly thanked. Choose one person you could meet individually for a face-to-face meeting in the next week. Your task is to write a gratitude letter (a letter of thanks) to this individual and deliver it in person. The letter should be specific about what he or she did that affected your life. Make it sing! It is important that you meet him or her in person. Don’t tell this person, however, about the purpose of this meeting. This exercise is much more fun when it is a surprise to the person you are thanking.
Because these instructions were specifically designed for adolescents, one would probably want to adapt them to be age appropriate for the user. Although the effects of this intervention appear to be somewhat transient, presumably this might be a treatment that one could use on repeated occasions. As argued previously, grateful people may tend to be happy people because they are particularly good at coping with difficult life events (Wood et al., 2007). We have argued that grateful individuals may be able to reframe difficult events so as to see the good that may come out of bad events (Watkins et al., 2003; Watkins et al., 2004). Biblical commentator Matthew Henry illustrated this attitude after he was robbed: Let me be thankful first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse, they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.
But the results I have presented to this point are largely correlational, so recently we examined grateful coping in an experimental design (Watkins et al, 2008). In this study participants first recalled an unpleasant “open” memory. An open memory is one which involved issues that are unresolved, and there is “unfinished business” associated with the memory (Bieke & Wirth-Beaumont, 2005). According to Bieke and colleagues, these memories are particularly emotional and can be intrusive. Participants were then randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In each condition participants wrote for three days. In the control condition they wrote about their plans for the following day, in the emotional control condition they wrote about their open memory following the disclosive writing approach of Pennebaker (1997), and in our condition of interest, participants wrote about the memory in a grateful manner by identifying positive consequences of the difficult event that they can now feel grateful for. We found that compared to the comparison condition, the gratitude journaling condition brought more closure to their open memory, decreased the negative emotion aroused by the memory, and decreased its intrusiveness. Because of the promising initial results for this intervention, I include a portion of our instructions here to assist individuals in utilizing this technique: For the next 20 minutes we would like you to write about your open memory. Think again about this experience for a few moments. At first it may seem that the event you wrote down might not have had any positive effects upon your life. However, sometimes even when bad things happen, they ultimately have positive consequences, things we can now be grateful for. Try to focus on the positive aspects or consequences of this difficult experience. As the result of this event, what kinds of things do you now feel thankful or grateful for? How has this event benefited you as a person? How have you grown? Were there personal strengths that grew out of your experience? How has the event made you better able to meet the challenges of the future? How has the event put your life into perspective? How has this event helped you appreciate the truly important people and things in your life? In sum, how can you be thankful for the beneficial consequences that have resulted from this event? As you write, do not worry about punctuation or grammar, just really let go and write as much as you can about the positive aspects of your experience that you feel you now can be grateful for.
I believe that this intervention has potential not only for individuals interested in improving their well-being, but for clinical populations as well. We interpreted the positive results of this study to be due to the grateful processing condition assisting individuals to fit this memory into this a coherent good life story, and subsequent linguistic analyses of the journaling in this study have added some support to this theory (Uhder, 2010; Uhder, Kononchuk, Sparrow, & Watkins, 2010). In sum, several interventions where individuals focus on past blessings and those who have blessed them have shown significant promise to be used for enhancing happiness, and grateful processing of painful experiences may help individuals come to terms with those events. I now turn to several issues that may be important in the application of these techniques. Lyubomirsky and colleagues (2005) have argued that a good proportion of one’s happiness (40%) is due to intentional activities. These are activities in which one may choose to engage in. The reason that intentional activities are said to encourage (or discourage) happiness more than external circumstances, is because they are less subject to habituation or adaptation effects. For example, after moving into a larger more expensive house, an individual may experience a temporary bump in happiness, but more than likely they will return to their previous level of happiness several months later. With an intentional activity such as walking in an aesthetic environment, however, one is less likely to become adapted to this activity, and thus the individual will continue to derive happiness from this activity. Lyubomirsky et al. argue that positive psychology exercises such as those discussed here are good examples of intentional activities that will be less likely to be subject to hedonic adaptation. However, even activities such as counting one’s blessings can become mindless and non-intentional, thus becoming subject to adaptation effects. Indeed, she presented some evidence for this theory in that those who engaged in more frequent gratitude exercises showed smaller increases in well-being than those who did these exercises less frequently (for contrasting results however, see Study 2 of Emmons & McCullough, 2003). I believe the issue is not so much frequency per se, but rather the important consideration is the manner in which the exercise is undertaken. If the participant is completing the exercise more as an “assignment” or another “chore” in their day, they will not be as likely to derive benefits from the exercise. Other evidence suggests that counting blessings may actually encourage adaptation to these events (Koo, Algoe, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008). However, this study also found that one may think about blessings in a way that might undo adaptation. If one thinks about how an event was surprising or might never have happened (e.g., “I was so fortunate to have met my wife; it would have been so easy for me to have never made that first phone call to her”), then they tend to experience more positive impact from thinking about the event. Clearly, how one counts their blessings is important. Thus, when implementing gratitude exercises it would seem prudent for individuals to think carefully about how these exercises can be accomplished in an intentional and engaged manner. There are several individual differences variables that may need to be considered when applying gratitude interventions. For example, there is some research suggesting that females may gain more out of gratitude than males (Kashdan, Mishra, Breen, & Froh, 2009). On the other hand, other results suggest this finding may be limited to adults (Froh, Yurkewicz, & Kashdan, 2009); early adolescent boys may actually gain more from gratitude than do girls. It is possible that adult men value their independence more than women, have difficulty admitting their dependence on others, and consequently have difficulty accepting and enjoying benefits they receive from others. If so, this may mean that before gratitude interventions can have maximum impact, some men (and some women as well) may need to consider alternative beliefs about themselves that allow for them to acknowledge interdependence on others. Whatever the case, gender is likely to continue to be an important consideration in the science and application of gratitude. Positive affectivity may be another important consideration when administering gratitude interventions. Froh, Kashdan et al. (2009) found that those low in positive affect gained more from their gratitude intervention. It is possible that with normal populations, there are those who have little room to gain in terms of emotional well-being, and thus the impact of positive psychology treatments are limited. Grateful individuals may have little to gain from gratitude exercises. On the other hand, grateful individuals may be more receptive to gratitude treatments. In either case, considerations such as level of positive affectivity and trait gratitude may be important when applying these interventions. Although I know of no research that speaks directly to this issue, an individual’s spirituality may also be an important consideration when applying gratitude techniques. Grateful individuals have been shown to be more religious on a number of different measures of religiosity (e.g., McCullough et al., 2002; Watkins et al. 2003), and thus gratitude exercises may be particularly effective for these individuals. However, similar to the case above, it could be that religious individuals are already sufficiently grateful and therefore have little to gain from gratitude interventions. This appears to be an interesting avenue for future research to pursue. Another intriguing possibility is that gratitude might enhance religiosity. Because induced positive affect enhances one’s ability to see meaningful relationships and thus meaning in life (King, Hicks, Krull, & Del Gaiso, 2006), it is quite possible that gratitude enhances spirituality. Because religious individuals would probably be interested in enhancing their spirituality, gratitude inductions may be important to these people. Although gratitude toward God has received little attention in the literature (but see Uhder, Webber, & Watkins, 2010), Krause’s (2007) finding that gratitude toward God buffers the impact of stress in the elderly suggests that this issue deserves more attention. Of course, gratitude toward God is likely to only be important to religious monotheists (Uhder et al., 2010). Taken together, these findings suggest that an individual’s religiosity is an important consideration when designing gratitude interventions.

Conclusions I began this chapter by asking “Why is gratitude so great?” A number of aspects of emotional and social well-being have been found to be associated with gratitude, and experimental work has provided promising evidence that these are not mere associations; gratitude may actually be causing enhancements in well-being. Why is gratitude so great? I submit that gratitude amplifies the good in one’s life. Gratitude amplifies the good in our experience of the present by enhancing our enjoyment and awareness of blessings. Gratitude also amplifies the good in our past by enhancing the accessibility and enjoyment of past blessings. Gratitude even amplifies the good in the bad by allowing individuals to see benefits that may come from difficult events. Finally, gratitude amplifies the good in our social life by increasing our awareness of the good that others do for us, and by increasing our awareness of those who are good to us. It also enhances our social well-being by amplifying the good in ourselves: when we feel grateful, we are more likely to bless others. Thus, gratitude amplifies the good in one’s life. Just as an amplifier amplifies the sound coming into a microphone, so gratitude amplifies the good. Just as a magnifying glass magnifies the object it is focused on, so gratitude magnifies the good that others do for us. “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought;” wrote Chesterton (1917, The age of the Crusades, para. 2), “and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” Perhaps one reason that “thanks are the highest form of thought” is because gratitude amplifies important blessings and people in our life.

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Abstract
In this chapter I explore the relationship between gratitude and well-being. After defining gratitude and distinguishing between state and trait gratitude, I proceed to describe the relationships between gratitude and various well-being measures. Gratitude has been found to be strongly associated with a number of emotional well-being variables, and a few measures of physical well-being. Moreover, there is promising evidence to suggest that gratitude may actually cause enhancements in well-being. I then describe how gratitude might promote well-being by presenting several putative mechanisms that help explain the gratitude and well-being relationship. If gratitude can enhance well-being, then it is important to understand how gratitude interventions may be used in applied settings to support the well-being of individuals. I provide specific descriptions of several gratitude interventions that have shown good outcomes. Finally, I conclude with an analogical theory of how gratitude might support well-being. I argue that gratitude benefits well-being by amplifying the good in one’s life.

Keywords: • Gratitude • Happiness • Subjective well-being

Relevant Chapter Questions: • What is gratitude? • How is gratitude measured? • Does gratitude contribute to well-being? • How does gratitude contribute to well-being? • What are the most effective gratitude interventions? • How can gratitude interventions be applied to enhance people’s well-being?

Important References:
R. A. Emmons & M. E. McCullough (Eds.), The psychology of gratitude. New York: Oxford University Press.
Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An empirical investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 377-389.
Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A.W.A, (2010). Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical Psychology Review, doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.005.