Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
— Cicero
Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, more hideous when thou show'st thee in a child than the sea-monster!
— Shakespeare's King Lear
A class of students was asked to identify the Seven Wonders of the World. With some minor disagreement, the following received the most attention: Egypt's great pyramids, Taj Mahal, Grand Canyon, Panama Canal, Empire State Building, St. Peter's Basilica, and China's Great Wall. However, there was one student who did not complete the assignment in time. When her teacher approached her, she stated that she was having some difficulty because there was so much to be grateful for and she could not decide that easily. Upon further inquiry, the student maintained that the Seven Wonders of the World were: to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to feel, to laugh, and to love (C. Colligan, personal communication, February 27, 2006).
Gratitude can be conceptualized as a virtue or as an emotional state. From the perspectives of moral philosophy and theology, gratitude is seen as a human strength that enhances one's personal and relational well-being and is beneficial for society as a whole (Simmel, 1950). McCullough, Kilpatrick, Emmons, and Larson (2001) theorized that gratitude is a moral affect—that is, one with moral precursors and consequences. They hypothesized that by experiencing gratitude, a person is motivated to carry out prosocial behavior, energized to sustain moral behaviors, and is inhibited from committing destructive interpersonal behaviors. Specifically, they posited that gratitude serves as a moral barometer, providing individuals with an affective readout that accompanies the perception that another person has treated them prosocially. Second, they posited that gratitude serves as a moral motive, stimulating people to behave prosocially after they have been the beneficiaries of other people's prosocial behavior. Third, they posited that gratitude serves as a moral reinforcer, encouraging prosocial behavior by reinforcing people for their previous good deeds. McCullough et al. adduced evidence from a wide variety of studies in personality, social, developmental and evolutionary psychology to support this conceptualization.
As an emotion, gratitude stems from the perception that one has experienced a positive outcome that has been intentionally provided by another person or “moral agent,” often but not necessarily a person (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). The object of gratitude is other-directed to persons, as well as to impersonal (nature) or non-human sources (God, animals, the cosmos). Gratitude may be defined as “a sense of thankfulness and joy in response to receiving a gift, whether the gift be a tangible benefit from a specific other or a moment of peaceful bliss evoked by natural beauty” (Peterson & Seligman, 2004, p. 554). As an emotion, gratitude is an attribution-dependent state that results from two stages of information processing: (a) recognizing that one has obtained a positive outcome; and (b) recognizing that there is an external source for this positive outcome. In the present study, we operationalize gratitude in a manner identical to that followed by Emmons and McCullough (2003) in their gratitude intervention studies. Specifically, we ask school-aged children to focus on things in their lives for which they are grateful or thankful. Previous research has demonstrated this to be an effective strategy for activating grateful thoughts and feelings (Emmons and McCullough, 2003 and Sheldon and Lyubomirsky, 2006).
Although embraced by philosophers, theologians, and popular authors, until recently gratitude has been largely ignored by the field of psychology (Emmons, 2004). Moreover, what research there is has been conducted solely with adults, resulting in a dearth of research on gratitude with children and adolescent populations. Given gratitude's relationship to happiness, hope, pride, optimism, positive mood, self-actualization, smooth interpersonal relationships, and a sense of community (Emmons & Shelton, 2002), a rigorous investigation of this positive emotion is vital if optimal psychological growth among early/late adolescents is to be fully understood. To this end, the purpose of the present investigation was to make the first attempt at determining the relationship between gratitude inducing behaviors (e.g., counting blessings) and well-being within an early adolescent population.
