IndexGratitude in social relationshipsThe neurological foundations of gratitudeTowards a personal practiceHappiness is a major human concern because it provides purpose and meaning to our actions. A major concern of a subdiscipline within psychology concerns the conditions and prerequisites for human happiness in general. Similar to the philosopher Aristotle's notion of virtue as a habit, happiness research attempts to find the strong links between personal practices and well-being. A “strong link” between a practice and its emotional correlate implies some degree of empirical or statistical connection, not just an armchair theory of happiness. Finding personal practices that promote happiness is important for empirical researchers, but it is also important for society as a whole. When individual members of a society are happy, the aggregate of happiness will increase. Social happiness does not increase when a new definition of happiness is derived or a new theory is developed; rather, it arises in response to practices that promote positive affect, some of which exist only at the individual level. The focus of this article is an individual-level practice aimed at promoting positive emotions based on the concept of gratitude. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The word “gratitude” has its origins in the Latin gratus, meaning “grateful” or “pleasant.” Not surprisingly, the history of the term is linked to spirituality as a form of humility, which is a virtue in monotheistic traditions. To the extent that one is grateful to God, who imparts his divine gifts to humanity, one correctly recognizes God's role in one's life. Indeed, ancient sources have commented that gratitude is a “parent” virtue (Wood, Joseph, & Linley, 2007). Similarly, the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith considered gratitude in the context of a moral study in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he concludes that gratitude is necessary for the proper functioning of society (Smith, 1759). Age-old concepts of gratitude extend beyond being grateful to God to being grateful to your neighbors, family, and friends. Modern notions of gratitude tend to treat the term more as an attitude or experience, rather than a trait or virtue as described by moral philosophers. For example, modern English speakers tend not to describe someone as “a grateful person,” but rather to describe being grateful as a temporary affective state. In line with the idea that gratitude is an attitude or cognitive state, happiness research in modern psychology tends to focus on the concept's relationship to subjective well-being or happiness. Indeed, Wood, Joseph, and Linley (2007) argue that gratitude has assumed a position of primary interest in psychological research concerning the question of happiness. Scholars such as Professor Robert Emmons of the University of California, Davis, have studied the relationship between gratitude and happiness. Emmons and McCullough (2003) found a strong positive effect of gratitude perspective on subjective well-being in a controlled experiment, providing strong evidence of a link. Furthermore, Emmons and Crumpler (2000) conclude that gratitude as a pleasant emotional state promotes more positive moods, and expressions of gratitude help people feel happier than they otherwise would. Knowing that there is an apparent connection between these two constructs in the psychological literature, there is the possibility of making a general claim thatGratitude is a beneficial personal practice. However, you may be wondering how we define gratitude so that scientists can assess a possible strong link to happiness. Watkins, Woodward, Stone, and Kolts (2003) attempted to derive a measurable account of gratitude, involving a solid definition of the concept. Once again, the question of whether gratitude is linked to the characteristics of individuals or to individual emotional states is a relevant question. Watkins et al. (2003) provide definitions for both a feeling (“affective trait” as “a feeling of grateful appreciation for favors received”) and a characteristic (“trait gratitude” as “the predisposition to experience this state”) (p. 432) . Evidently, the definition is parsimonious but also adequately explanatory. The notion of gratitude as a trait also implies some connection to evolutionary theory, and an explanation of this relationship would paint a more complete picture of gratitude within a population. Nowak and Roch (2007) examine the conceptual difference between gratitude and another concept called “upstream reciprocity,” which is the increased likelihood that one recipient of kindness will in turn help another. Similar to Watkins et al. (2003) of gratitude as grateful affective appreciation, Nowak and Roch (2007) place gratitude in the context of the evolution of cooperation and find that positive emotions that enhance helping behavior can actually evolve through natural selection. The predisposition to experience gratitude and appreciation is more likely to produce happier moods ( Emmons & Crumpler, 2000 ), perhaps thereby improving self-confidence and thus the chances of mating behavior. The framework provided by Watkins et al. (2003) is useful here insofar as it explains the evolutionary pressures acting on the trait of gratitude through its close connection with the affective trait that individuals actually experience after receiving favors from another. Another advantage of Watkins et al. (2003) the gratitude approach is the explicit attempt to give a measurable and quantifiable operational definition of the concept. Using their Gratitude, Resentment, and Appreciation Test (GRAT), the authors found a reliable and valid measure of dispositional (or “trait”) gratitude. Furthermore, the test contains moderate construct validity in its ability to predict feelings of gratitude at a given time in the future. Returning to the notion of “strong ties” in empirical happiness studies, it is important to have reliable and valid measures of gratitude in order to determine robust correlative relationships and demonstrate a working personal practice to improve subjective well-being. Based on solid scientific foundations, a compelling argument can be made on a personal level for the role of gratitude in well-being. The purpose of this article is to build this argument through a discussion of the science of gratitude as it relates to happiness. in positive psychology. By focusing on the individual and what a person does to improve their subjective well-being as a habit, this article will entail generalizations for anyone capable of grateful or appreciative affection. With generalizations, it is important to note the connection between successful personal practices and a social level of effect; in other words, gratitude as a personal practice can produce a desirable net effect for groups or populations. In addition to examining what constitutes successful personal practice for improving lifelong happiness (in the eudemonistic sense of the term), this review will also incorporate information on what empiricallyit works and what doesn't. A project of this magnitude will proceed from the highest levels of organization (social bonds and friendships) to individual behavior (depression and mental illness) to inside the brain in the neuroscience of gratitude. By addressing subjective well-being at each of these levels in the organizational hierarchy, personal practice emerges as a common theme. Therefore, the challenge is to take this scientific evidence and translate it into a practical, everyday phenomenon for most people, a challenge we will address later in this article. Gratitude in Social Relationships Gratitude, by its very nature, is a social emotion, and much of the previous research on its social effects has focused on the return of favors (Algoe, Haidt & Gable, 2008). Recently, however, psychologists have begun to focus their research on the potential effects that feelings of gratitude can have on the formation and maintenance of healthy relationships (relationships in which members exhibit strong positive feelings toward one another). In 2008, Algoe, Haidt, and Gable provided the first empirical evidence linking gratitude as an affective state with the promotion of positive relationships. Crucially, their investigation was rich in worldly realism: They studied the real relationships that formed between new recruits in a series of sororities at the University of Virginia and their "big sisters," girls who had already been members of the sorority for a year. This worldly realism is essential if the findings of their research are to be applied to personal practices that occur in real life, not in the artificially created laboratory environments typical of gratitude research (Algoe, Haidt & Gable, 2008). relationships between new and existing sorority members, the researchers took advantage of an existing initiative at the University of Virginia known as “Big Sister Week.” During this four-day period, each new recruit ("Little Sister") is randomly assigned to a Big Sister, whose identity is not revealed until the end of the week. Big Sisters plan events for their Little Sister throughout the week, as well as buy or give them gifts, in an effort to make them feel welcome as part of their sisterhood. Algoe et al. (2008) studied how the gratitude (for the gifts that were given) felt by the Little Sister for their specific Big Sister influenced both the Little Sister and the Big Sister's evaluation of their relationship, both immediately following the Big Sister Week (when the identity of their Big Sister was revealed to each Little Sister) and a month later. During Big Sister Week, each Little Sister was asked to complete a questionnaire each time they received a gift from their Big Sister. The questionnaire was intended to measure how much the Little Sister "felt grateful" for the gift, how much she liked the gift, how much she felt that the gift was a surprise, how thoughtful she thought the Big Sister had been in choosing the gift. specific gift, how much she thought the gift cost her Big Sister, and how much effort she believed her Big Sister made to provide the gift. These questions were asked to determine the potential moderating or mediating effects of other social variables indicated by previous research, such as feelings of indebtedness and unexpectedness of a reward. This was used to distinguish the feeling of gratitude from potentially confounding social factors. In addition to the questionnaire about how grateful they were for the gift, each Little Sister was asked to answer a second questionnaire after receiving each gift. Thisquestionnaire was designed to assess the perceived quality of the relationship each Little Sister felt with her Big Sister, and asked how much she believed her Big Sister "understood" her, and how much she liked and felt close to her Big Sister. Relationship quality was measured as the average of the responses to all three questions. The researchers found that the Little Sister's feelings of gratitude were predictive of a positive relationship with the Big Sister (p = 0.000). This first part of the study provides evidence that feeling gratitude can actually be influential in forming new positive relationships with strangers. At the end of Big Sister Week, once the identity of their Big Sister was revealed, the Little Sisters were asked to rate their relationship in terms of how happy and disappointed they were during their interactions, as well as how connected they felt to her . A month after Big Sister Week ended, the relationship between each Big and Little Sister couple was assessed again, including questions about whether their Big Sister was one of their closest friends, whether they felt supported by their Big Sister and how much time they had spent in each other's company during the previous week. Algoe et al. (2008) found that the average gratitude indicated by a Little Sister over the course of Big Sister Week was predictive of relationship quality both at the end of Big Sister Week and one month later, although no significant correlation was found with how long had been spent together recently. This provides evidence that gratitude can have longer-lasting effects, promoting not only the formation of positive relationships, but also their maintenance. Furthermore, Algoe et al. (2008) found that Little Sisters' levels of gratitude were significantly predictive of Big Sisters' ratings of relationship quality. This indicates that it is not only receiving gifts for which one feels gratitude that contributes to a strong relationship, but that giving these gifts (generating a feeling of gratitude in another) also has positive effects. The researchers suggest that gratitude can induce a cycle of relationship building, in which the roles of benefactor and recipient are continually reversed. This suggests that positive relationships can be maintained over time by creating a cycle in which you provide something that induces gratitude in another person, in exchange for which they attempt to foster the same feeling in you. Further support for the hypothesis that gratitude can promote healthy, positive relationships comes from the work of Algoe and Haidt (2009). The authors explained to the arriving participants that their study was about the effects of interpersonal communication on avoiding demand characteristics. A letter-writing task was used to induce feelings of gratitude in participants (there was also a control condition, as well as an "admiration" condition, as researchers consider admiration to be in the same family of emotions as gratitude, and they wanted to avoid ambiguity or confusion between the two). Participants were asked to write a letter to someone they knew, describing a time when that person had done something for them for which they felt grateful. A questionnaire was administered immediately after the letter writing task as a manipulation check, ensuring that participants felt gratitude towards the person, rather than other similar emotions, such as admiration. Participants were then given “background sheets” describing two people with whom they could choose to engage in a conversation with.instant messaging. One person was described as having just transferred to University and looking for new social opportunities (this person was labeled a “social person”). The second person was described as someone who had done a lot of community service work in the area (the “prosocial person”). Task participants were then asked which person they would prefer to engage in an online conversation with. The researchers found that participants in the gratitude condition indicated that they wanted to meet other people like the person to whom they wrote the letter significantly more frequently than participants in the task. the state of control, as well as a stronger desire to “give back” to others. In line with this idea, more participants in the gratitude condition indicated that they would prefer to chat with the prosocial person (rather than the social person) because they considered him or her to be more similar to the person to whom they had written the gratitude letter. The researchers hypothesized that while people who experience gratitude primarily desire to reciprocate the person toward whom they feel grateful for some act/gift, they are also willing to extend the positive, relationship-building feelings toward others who are similar to that person. This indicates that gratitude can be helpful in building positive relationships not only between a benefactor and a recipient, but also between a recipient and others. who demonstrate similar qualities to the benefactor – that is, gratitude helps build many positive relationships, even if the gratitude is directed towards only one person. The influence of gratitude on promoting and maintaining positive, healthy relationships is important for long-term happiness, because positive relationships are known to “help us get through difficult times and thrive in good times” (Algoe, Haidt & Gable, 2008 p. 429). ). Because gratitude helps start positive relationships, it creates a structure for those positive relationships that help us thrive in the future. Additionally, because gratitude works to maintain those positive relationships long-term, it allows the resulting happiness to be long-lasting. Gratitude and mental health Throughout the empirical literature, the beneficial effects of gratitude on mental health have been demonstrated at multiple levels. The presence of positive emotions is a widely accepted characteristic of happiness, and gratitude can often easily be considered a positive emotion. Furthermore, the trait of gratitude has been positively correlated with the personality trait of resilience – the ability to recover quickly and effectively after adverse experiences (Algoe & Stanton, 2011). Furthermore, both gratitude and resilience have been shown to be linked to the development of more and better coping mechanisms within individuals, with gratitude perhaps acting as a mediator in this case (Algoe & Stanton, 2011). Fredrickson, Tugade, Waugh, and Larken (2003) provides a compelling summary of the many and varied beneficial effects of positive emotions, including gratitude. An important benefit of positive emotions is their ability to reverse the adverse physical effects of negative emotions on the mind and body. Experiencing many negative emotions, such as fear, anger, and sadness, triggers arousal in the body's autonomic nervous system, which, while helpful in making the body alert, focused, and prepared to face danger, has unwanted effects such as increased blood pressure blood and vasoconstriction. Research has shown that experiencing pleasant emotions is beneficial in bringing the body back to its baseline more quickly than when experiencing neutral or negative emotions (Fredrickson, Mancuso,Branigan and Tugade, 2000). A further notable effect of positive emotions, such as gratitude, comes from their ability to decrease the activity of the autonomic nervous system. A feature of this activity is that it causes the brain to focus more on the problem at hand. Because positive emotions reduce this effect, they contribute to “cognitive broadening” when experienced following a negative emotional event. This has been shown to lead to greater flexibility, creativity, and efficiency in the brain, and many researchers believe this promotes the development of creative and effective coping mechanisms (Fredrickson et al., 2003). This broadening has also been linked to increased circulation of dopamine in the brain, which is known to be associated with positive emotions and rewarding experiences (Immordino-Yang & Sylvan, 2010). Furthermore, it has been hypothesized that developing better coping mechanisms through the experience of positive emotions helps develop beneficial and long-lasting personality characteristics, including resilience (Fredrickson et al., 2003). That is, the brief experience of positive emotions such as gratitude may contribute to the development of lasting traits that contribute to positive emotionality and the ability to better handle difficult situations. It follows, then, that a personal practice aimed at promoting and cultivating gratitude could have lasting effects, even if the practice were interrupted, because lasting personality characteristics are created or promoted. A further interesting effect of this increased resilience is that resilient people have been shown to be adept at promoting positive emotions in people they are close to. This, in turn, creates a more positive and supportive social network for the person, who is known to be useful for better coping with difficult life experiences (Fredrickson et al., 2003; Kumpfer, 1999). Therefore, not only does gratitude help people choose to seek, promote, and maintain healthy, positive relationships, as demonstrated by Algoe et al. (2008) and Algoe and Haidt (2009), but it also helps to increase positivity in one's existing social network, making it more supportive. Others have also suggested that on an intrinsic level, gratitude provides the motivation to show gratitude and praise to a benefactor, which is helpful in promoting a positive relationship (Algoe & Haidt, 2009). This suggests that the happiness benefits associated with gratitude will be very long-lasting. In 2011, Algoe and Stanton studied the effects of gratitude in combating negative affect in a group of women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. This form of cancer does not have a high survival rate and is therefore a major and ever-present stressor in the lives of these women. In the first part of the study, women were asked to write about a time in the past month when someone had done something for them, indicating whether they had had positive or negative feelings about the experience. Fourteen emotions were subsequently assessed, including gratitude (many emotions were assessed to hide the target emotion – gratitude – under study). Participants also completed a questionnaire assessing their perspective on the event: closed and avoidant (feeling as if they were involuntarily trapped in a situation where they should have returned a favor), or open and approachable (willing to accept kindness from the 'event). benefactor). Gratitude was found to be highly negatively correlated with closed and negative perspective (r = -0.73) and highly positively correlated with open and positive perspective (r = 0.83). Although these are correlations and causality cannotbe determined, there is however a clear connection between the affective state of gratitude and a more positive overall outlook. Adopting an open and approachable perspective is more conducive to happiness than a closed and avoidant personality, especially if this positive perspective is extended to other areas of one's life, bringing them into a more positive light. Algoe and Stanton (2011) refer to this as the ego transcendence hypothesis. In the second part of Algoe and Stanton's (2011) study, participants were asked to think of times in the past month when other people had done something for them. . They were then asked to indicate how often they experienced the same fourteen emotions in response to favors. The researchers then used an average of a participant's responses regarding feeling thankful, grateful, and appreciative to create their "typical gratitude response." This was used to determine whether a participant generally felt grateful towards people who had done them favors in the past month, or whether they generally showed a different emotional response. In response to each favor, the level of support participants perceived from their social network was also recorded. In the overall sample, a typically grateful response was not significantly related to perceived social support; however, the researchers performed additional statistical analyzes to determine whether the correlation between gratitude and perceived social support could be mediated by particular personality characteristics. They found that for women who were not ambivalent about expressing their emotions, gratitude was positively correlated with perceived level of social support. Therefore, for some people, though not all, gratitude can contribute to feeling like you have a social support network. This is very useful when dealing with negative affects and helps to aid and accelerate recovery after traumatic events (Kumpfer, 1999). Therefore, gratitude is not only beneficial through the numerous pathways through which positive emotions improve happiness and mental health, but it is also useful in the opposite side of the problem: combating and reducing negative affects. Long-term happiness requires not only a high level of positive affect, but also low levels or infrequent experiences of negative emotions: gratitude promotes both of these effects. The neurological foundations of gratitude Gratitude is a complex human emotion that requires many different psychological processes to recognize a negative emotion. event that requires gratitude and in producing the feeling of gratitude. Producing gratitude requires first recognizing that you have received an unwarranted service or gift from another. After recognition of the gift, the benefits of receiving it must be weighed against the costs of what the gift entails. The costs possibly associated with these gifts may include the need to reciprocate with altruistic actions towards individuals from whom gifts have previously been received. The anticipation of reciprocity is one of the driving forces of human gratitude, and has been shown to be advantageous in animals such as vampire bats that share blood meals with hungry nestmates even when they are unrelated (Williams, 1984). After accepting a gift, the recipient must experience positive emotions that convert into a feeling of gratitude. Finally, the recipient must encode memories of the gift and gratitude felt towards the giver for gratitude to have a lasting effect on human emotions. These processes must arise from distinct brain structuresthat work in unison to form the abstract social value of gratitude. Recent research has highlighted the possibility that areas of the neocortex regulate and interpret information from the limbic system in neuroscience studies of social constructs and values. (Zahn et al., 2009). Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging have found that when contemplating the relationship of social concepts, such as honorable and courageous, greater activation is shown in the anterior superior temporal lobe of the cortex than when comparing a control using physical functions, such as nurturing and useful (Zahn et al., 2007). The anterior superior temporal lobe must play a role in social interaction by providing abstract knowledge of social behavior. Other areas in this study were also found to be activated, including the orbitofrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and temporoparietal junction. It was also found that anterior superior temporal lobe activation was independent of the valence of the social construct. It made no difference whether the construct had a negative or positive connotation; the area was activated due to the need to elaborate abstract ideas about social values. Along with cortical structures, much older limbic structures also play an important role in the production of gratitude (Immordino-Yang & Sylvan, 2010). The mesolimbic dopamine system plays a huge role in producing positive affect and encoding reward values. It is possible that the positive effect caused by receiving a gift may be encoded by dopamine neurons in much the same way as reported by Tobler, Fiorillo, and Schultz in 2005. Their study examined adaptive properties in spike frequency and in the coding of dopamine neurons in response to expected and unexpected rewarding stimuli. A situation that creates gratitude might be one in which a gift or service is offered to the recipient and this information is processed similarly in the limbic system. Adaptive firing rates of dopamine-releasing neurons in the brain's rewarding structures may be what causes positive, rewarding, gratitude-eliciting emotions. The memory of an event that caused gratitude must be recorded and be available for access if it is to have any lasting effect on an organism. Studies show that contemplating moments of gratitude increases activation in the basal forebrain, a structure critical to memory (Zahn et al., 2009.) The basal forebrain is directly connected to the hippocampus by a tract of chologenergetic projections. When the gray matter of the basal forebrain was atrophied, cognitive functions, such as memory recall, were impaired. This shows how memory formation is related to the formation of feelings of gratitude and has implications for the storage and retrieval of memories of moments when gratitude was expressed. Many studies on the neural pathways of gratitude have been conducted in patients with brain injuries caused by severe head trauma or neurological disease. While not experimental, and therefore unable to definitively say the cause of any findings, these types of studies can shed light on which structures to look more closely at. Richard Emmons (2007) conducted a study on patients with severe prefrontal dysfunction. These patients had Parkinson's disorder and, compared to healthy individuals, did not experience any improvement in mood when recalling an event in which they felt gratitude. The healthy control group showed a significant increase in affect following the reminder of gratitude. Patients who,.