Philip C. Watkins

Gratitude is a pivotal concept in the psychology of religion because it is one of the most frequently experienced emotions toward God. The authors developed a trait measure of Gratitude to God (GTG-T) and investigated the association between Gratitude to God and psychological and spiritual well-being in four studies. Study 1 provided evidence for the validity of the GTG-T as Gratitude to God was associated with overall well-being and predicted increases in spiritual well-being over time. Study 2 used a prospective design to show that Gratitude to God predicted increases in general gratitude. In a third study, results showed that Gratitude to God predicted increased grateful emotion and increased confidence in the existence of God over time. In Studies 2 and 3, mediation analyses supported the model that Gratitude to God enhances well-being by promoting generalized gratitude. Study 4 provided further valid evidence for the GTG-T and also showed that gratitude to God is much more strongly related to one’s heartfelt conception of God as loving than to their doctrinal conception of a loving God. Gratitude to God deserves additional scientific scrutiny in the psychology of religion and spirituality than it has received to date.

In this chapter, we review recent research on the relationship between gratitude and happiness. First, we show how gratitude is a critical component of the good life. Because gratitude is vital to wellbeing, it is important to establish the causes of state and trait gratitude. We explain an appraisal approach to grateful emotion and show how certain benefit interpretations are critical to the experience of gratitude. In this context, we describe an encouraging new paradigm that has been applied to the study of gratitude: cognitive bias modification. This experimental approach has helped to establish the causal status of interpretations to gratitude, and we describe how this methodology should help to understand gratitude in future research. Recent research on the cognitive antecedents of gratitude has shown that the nature of the benefactor matters to experiences of gratitude, and in this regard, a divine benefactor may create a unique experience of gratitude. Gratitude scholars have now turned to the question: How does gratitude enhance happiness? We present research and theories that have attempted to speak to this issue. Finally, we explore the question: Who benefits most from gratitude interventions? Research has supplied some surprising answers to this question.

The authors used a prospective design to investigate how gratitude to God predicts religious well-being over time. Gratitude to God is a central aspect of monotheistic religions, and thus may be particularly important to the religious/spiritual well-being of believers. Participants completed online measures of trait and state gratitude to God, along with spiritual well-being, nearness to God, and religious commitment scales over a one-to-two-month period. General well-being, trait gratitude, and the Big Five personality traits were also assessed. After controlling baseline levels, trait gratitude and the Big Five personality traits, dispositional gratitude to God at Time 1 predicted increased religious well-being, nearness to God, and religious commitment at Time 2. Although gratitude to God was significantly related to general well-being variables in cross-sectional analyses, it did not predict these variables over time. Validity data for the gratitude to God measures are also presented. The results suggest that gratitude to God is important to religious/spiritual well-being, and gratitude to God may be a critical variable for research on positive psychology and the psychology of religion/spirituality.

Mood congruent memory (MCM) in depressed individuals, tends to be biased toward memories consistent with their mood, i.e. negative or unpleasant memories. Although MCM is a robust finding, the large majority of studies have used free-recall paradigms, and that methodology does little to delineate the cognitive mechanisms determining MCM. This study was designed to investigate whether MCM bias is a function of implicit or explicit memory. Implicit memory is taken as a measure of the organization or strength of association of the aspects of a memory representation, whereas explicit memory also taps elaboration that may involve control procedures such as retrieval strategies. Thus a comparison of implicit and explicit MCM bias may provide important information about the involvement of the structure of the memory representation, or the involvement of elaboration processes in MCM. Two groups, a group of clinical depressives and a comparison group, were studied. Each group engaged in an encoding task involving words of varying affective valence. Following this encoding task, all subjects engaged in an explicit memory task (cued recall), and an implicit memory test (word completion). As expected, a MCM bias was found in explicit memory, however, contrary to predictions, no MCM bias was found in implicit memory. This finding was interpreted as supporting the involvement of elaborative mechanisms in MCM. A second finding showed that MCM was found with depression items but not with physical threat words. Thus, the MCM bias in explicit memory is somewhat specific to information that is congruent with depression rather than to all negativistic information.

In this study we used Cognitive Bias Modification to modify interpretation biases hypothesized to influence gratitude. Participants were randomly allocated to either a gratitude or a comparison non-gratitude training condition in which they were guided to disambiguate 80 ambiguous scenarios in terms of whether the reader perceived themselves as having benefited – or not – from help provided by another person. Following training, those allocated to the grateful condition made more interpretations of positive benefit when reading new ambiguous test scenarios than those in the comparison condition. Furthermore, participants in the gratitude training condition rated real personal events as having significantly greater benefit value and altruism of the benefactor. Finally, those in the grateful training condition showed greater post-training ratings of gratitude, increased joy, and decreased negative affect. We conclude that interpretations of benefit can be modified by training, and that enhanced benefit interpretations lead to congruent changes in gratitude.

In this paper I respond to Johnson’s review by proposing a theory for the appraisal structure of joy. After presenting the appraisal approach to emotion, I describe two contrasting approaches to joy: joy as the fundamental positive affect that arises from a very broad-based construal (a response to something appraised as good), or joy as a discrete emotion with its own unique appraisal story. I argue for the second approach, and propose that joy is a response to a situation appraised as bringing one in closer connection/union with someone or something important. I present evidence for viewing joy as a discrete emotion and conclude by describing research that speaks to the appraisal structure of joy, while acknowledging and recommending the need for further research. Preliminary evidence supports the idea that joy is a discrete positive emotion that may be important to human flourishing.

In three studies we investigated joy and its relationship to subjective well-being (SWB). We developed measures of joy based on recent conceptualizations of joy in the humanities and social sciences. In Studies 1 and 2 we developed reliable measures of state and trait joy. In Study 3 we used a two-month prospective design to investigate the relationship of joy to gratitude and SWB. We found that dispositional gratitude predicted increases in state joy over time. We also found that trait joy predicted increases in state gratitude, providing evidence for an intriguing upward spiral between joy and gratitude. Finally, we found that trait joy was associated with increases in SWB over time. Factor analyses indicated that joy loaded separately from other positive emotions. We conclude that joy is a discrete positive emotion, it can be measured reliably with self-report instruments, and that it may be an important component of well-being.

If gratitude is important to well-being, it is important to understand the factors that might inhibit gratitude. The purpose of this study was to investigate four putative inhibitors of gratitude: narcissism, cynicism, materialism/envy, and indebtedness. We used a prospective design where participants were administered measures related to the putative inhibitors along with trait and state gratitude, 2 months apart. After controlling for initial levels of gratitude, Time 1 narcissism, cynicism, and materialism/envy were negatively associated with Time 2 state gratitude. Evidence also supported the theory that narcissism and cynicism may interact in a vicious cycle over time. We conclude that narcissism, cynicism, and materialism inhibit state gratitude, and narcissism and cynicism may be the foundational ‘thieves of thankfulness.’