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Gratitude and happiness: Development of a measure of gratitude, and relationships with subjective well-being
Social Behavior and Personality, 2003 by Watkins, Philip C, Woodward, Kathrane, Stone, Tamara, Kolts, Russell L
We also found strong relationships between dispositional gratitude and various measures of happiness and SWB. While most of these associations were demonstrated with direct self-report measures, in Study 3 we showed that gratitude was also correlated with an indirect measure of happiness (semantic differential ratings of neutral words). The association of the GRAT with the SWLS compares quite favorably with other personality traits that have been shown to have reliable associations with SWB (see Watkins, in press). Of course, these correlations may simply reflect the idea that gratitude is an epiphenomenon of happiness. However, in two studies we found that gratitude interventions improved mood. In a more long-term investigation on the impact of gratitude on emotional well-being, Emmons and McCullough (2003) found similar effects. In three studies, they demonstrated that a daily and weekly practice of gratitude caused increases in a number of positive affect variables, including SWB and hope. Their gratitude intervention also prompted decreases in a number of negative affect variables. Because the field of SWB has largely relied on correlational designs, results indicating that the induction of grateful thoughts can actually cause improvements in SWB are of particular significance.
How does gratitude promote SWB? The answer to this question awaits future research, but some authors have offered suggestions as to how gratitude might enhance SWB (Emmons & McCullough, 2003; Watkins, in press). For example, gratitude might promote happiness by enhancing one's experience of positive events, by enhancing adaptive coping to negative events, by enhancing encoding and retrieval of positive events, by enhancing one's social network, or by preventing or mitigating depression. Investigations into these proposed mechanisms should provide valuable information for the understanding of happiness.
Although we have demonstrated that gratitude can cause positive affect, it is still possible that happiness enhances gratitude as well. Positive affect research provides a number of reasons why gratitude should be more likely in the presence of positive affect (see Isen, 1999). Does the relationship between gratitude and SWB result from gratitude causing happiness, or is it that happiness causes gratitude? In answer to this conundrum we support the notion that happiness and gratitude may operate in a "cycle of virtue" (Watkins, in press), whereby gratitude enhances happiness, but happiness enhances gratitude as well. This may be another "upward spiral" where positive affect has been proposed to provide benefits for the individual that tend to feed into further benefits (cf. Fredrickson, 1998). Clearly, these speculative notions await further research.
We have argued that there are several components to trait gratitude. In large measure, our results support the notion that grateful individuals have at least three characteristics. First, grateful individuals have a sense of abundance. Grateful individuals do not feel that they have been deprived in life. The second component of trait gratitude appears to be an appreciation of simple pleasures. Our results suggest that grateful individuals appreciate the common everyday pleasures of life. Thirdly, grateful individuals appreciate the contribution of others to their well-being. While our locus-of-control findings suggest that grateful individuals still take appropriate credit for their successes, our results also imply that grateful individuals are quick to acknowledge how others have contributed to their well-being. Results from our religiosity measures suggest that not only do grateful individuals admit the beneficial contributions of their fellow humans, they are also more likely to acknowledge the contribution of the divine.
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