Jeffrey J. Froh’s research while affiliated with Hofstra University and other places
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Gratitude is important for social and emotional health. Research suggests that there is a relation between experiencing and expressing gratitude and happiness. The aim of this chapter is to review current research regarding gratitude development and happiness, adolescent gratitude development, and to discuss future recommendations. This chapter also discusses a study examining adolescent perspectives on the meaning of being thankful. To obtain adolescent perspectives on the meaning of being thankful, adolescents (N = 1,098) wrote essays describing what being thankful meant to them. Thematic analysis was used to identify and analyze themes within the essays. Percentiles were calculated for the most recurrent themes across essays (Appreciation = 54.07%, Family = 31.42%, Positive Emotions = 28.81%, Assistance/Support from Others = 25.99%, Friendship = 21.18%, and Downward Comparison = 16.60%). Understanding gratitude development in adolescents can aid in creating effective interventions, potentially increasing adolescent well-being and happiness.
Despite decades of research on materialism, there are few viable strategies for reducing materialism in younger consumers. In this paper, we present two studies conducted among over 900 adolescents that reveal a promising strategy for decreasing materialism: fostering gratitude. In Study 1, results from a nationally representative survey showed that children and adolescents with a grateful disposition were less materialistic. In Study 2, experimental evidence showed that an intervention designed to increase gratitude (i.e. keeping a gratitude journal) significantly reduced materialism among adolescents and also attenuated materialism’s negative effect on generosity. Using real money and donation as a behavioral measure, we found that adolescents who kept a gratitude journal donated 60% more of their earnings to charity compared to those in the control condition. We discuss the implications of our findings, offer some suggestions for putting our results into action, and provide an agenda for future research in this domain.
Gratitude is important for social and emotional health. Research suggests that there is a relation between experiencing and expressing gratitude and happiness. The aim of this chapter is to review current research regarding gratitude development and happiness, adolescent gratitude development, and to discuss future recommendations. This chapter also discusses a study examining adolescent perspectives on the meaning of being thankful. To obtain adolescent perspectives on the meaning of being thankful, adolescents (N = 1,098) wrote essays describing what being thankful meant to them. Thematic analysis was used to identify and analyze themes within the essays. Percentiles were calculated for the most recurrent themes across essays (Appreciation = 54.07%, Family = 31.42%, Positive Emotions = 28.81%, Assistance/Support from Others = 25.99%, Friendship = 21.18%, and Downward Comparison = 16.60%). Understanding gratitude development in adolescents can aid in creating effective interventions, potentially increasing adolescent well-being and happiness.
Is gratitude developmentally related to improvements in social behavior? This study examined 566 adolescents (51.6% female, M age = 11.95 years at baseline, 68.0% White, 11.0% African-American, 9.9% Asian-American, 1.9% Hispanic, 8.8% ‘Other’) from middle school to high school for 4 years. Controlling for social desirability, age, SES, and gender, gratitude growth predicted decreases in antisocial behavior over 4 years, and life satisfaction growth marginally mediated this relation. Further, gratitude growth predicted increases in prosocial behavior over 4 years, but life satisfaction did not mediate this relation. Reverse models were also examined. Antisocial behavior growth predicted gratitude change, which was mediated by life satisfaction growth. Prosocial behavior growth predicted gratitude change, but was not mediated by life satisfaction growth. Finally, gratitude growth predicted family support, trust, and intentional self-regulation at the 4 year timepoint, and it predicted empathy with marginal significance. Implications for theory and educational applications are discussed.
Though positive psychology continues to gain recognition within the field of psychology, school psychology has mostly followed a disease-oriented model. Thus, there is still much to be done to promote its presence within the schools. School psychologists should continue to focus on promoting a science that denotes equal attention to curing pathology and promoting positive wellbeing in the schools. This chapter focuses on the virtue that has been proven to be the strongest relation to life satisfaction in youth: gratitude. Research has shown that the purposeful practice of gratitude can help youth obtain more fulfilling relationships and more engagement with their schools and communities. This chapter discusses the three empirically supported gratitude interventions for youth: the gratitude journal, the gratitude visit and the gratitude curriculum. This chapter also discusses best practices in gratitude assessment in children and adolescents, followed by highlighting gratitude’s role in school functioning. This chapter provides a detailed account of positive psychology’s current role in the Australian school system, the Model for Positive Education and ethical issues faced by school psychologists today. We close with future implications of how to further advance the study of gratitude in youth.
Gratitude has been conceptualized in many different ways. There is evidence to support that gratitude is “a moral virtue, an attitude, an emotion, a habit, a personality trait, [and] a coping response” (Emmons & McCullough, 2003, p. 377). Emmons (2004, p. 554) defines it 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.” Recently, the positive psychology field has acknowledged gratitude’s benefits. As much as gratitude’s acknowledgement in the positive psychology field is something to celebrate, gratitude has been inconsistently studied across children, adolescents, and adults. Conducting a PsycINFO literature search for articles with the terms “gratitude” and “adults” in the abstract yields 171 papers. When the search uses the terms “gratitude” and “adolescents,” that number drops to 87. Using the terms “gratitude” and “adolescence” decreases that number even further to 8. Because of the few studies examining gratitude in adolescent populations, there is an empirical need to better understand the nature of gratitude among adolescents. The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on what is known thus far about gratitude in adolescents. It is hoped that providing a comprehensive theoretical picture of gratitude development during adolescence will increase our understanding of why gratitude is valuable both personally and socially during this developmental period. First, we review factors that serve as obstacles or assets in healthy gratitude development while acknowledging the nature of gratitude at different developmental stages. Next, we examine the effects of gratitude development on prosocial versus antisocial behavior. Finally, we review the relation between gratitude and subjective well-being from both a hedonic and eudaimonic perspective. Gratitude Development in Adolescents and the Role of Materialism Tudge, Freitas, Mokrova, Wang, and O’Brien (2015) examined different types of grateful expression among cross-sections of children ages 7 to 14, who were instructed to write down their greatest wish and what they would do for the person who granted them their wish. Children ages 7 to 10 were most likely to express concrete gratitude. Concrete gratitude occurs when children want to give the benefactor something similar in return for a gift they have received (e.g., “I should give him a book”), although they do not consider the gift giver’s wishes.
... Gratitude challenges simple taxonomy (Emmons et al., 2019). Its conceptualizations take it as an emotion, a trait, an attitude, a habit, a moral virtue, or a coping response (Bausert et al., 2018). ...
... Adolescents with higher gratitude often exhibit more positive coping attitudes and strategies when facing risks and challenges [4]. Research has shown that gratitude benefits adolescents' psychological health and positive development and can enhance their well-being [5][6][7]. Family factors are significant in influencing adolescents' gratitude. Positive parenting can increase adolescents' gratitude [8]. ...
... The assessment of psychosocial strengths 1 in children and adolescents has predominately focused on the measurement of single traits and constructs, such as grit (Christopoulou, Lakioti, Pezirkianidis, Karakasidou, & Stalikas, 2018), optimism (Oberle, Guhn, Gadermann, Thomson, & Schonert-Reichl, 2018), hope (Pedrotti, 2018), and gratitude (Gottlieb & Froh, 2019). Although there is substantial value in assessing and evaluating the beneficial correlates of individual constructs, we suggest that a whole-child paradigm (Alford & White, 2015) provides an optimal rationale supporting the use of comprehensive measures of psychosocial strengths. ...
... Indeed, gratitude is relevant to adolescents' moral, social, and emotional development. Researchers have demonstrated that grateful youth, from diverse communities, have better subjective wellbeing and prosocial behaviors, as well as lower levels of materialism and antisocial behaviors than their less grateful counterparts (Bono et al., 2019;Chaplin et al., 2019;Kong et al., 2021;Mesurado and Resett, 2024). Additionally, gratitude activities are commonly used in positive psychology interventions in both youth and adult populations (Carr et al., 2021). ...
... Recently, the positive psychology field has acknowledged the benefits of gratitude and it has become a key construct in psychology research in order to understand social and emotional development of individuals (Bausert et al., 2018). Research has found evidence for a relationship between gratitude and a wide range of measures of well-being, showing that grateful people tend to experience a higher degree of life satisfaction and positive affect than those who have lower levels of gratitude (Xiang and Yuan, 2020). ...
... Life satisfaction has come to be recognized as a distinguished indicator for individuals' daily functioning [4,5], especially in psychosocial functions [6,7]. Individuals with higher levels of life satisfaction tend to exhibit more prosocial behaviors [8] and are less prone to antisocial behaviors [9], especially in children and adolescents [10,11]. Therefore, life satisfaction emerges as a pivotal determinant of children's social behaviors. ...
... School engagement is another concept that is closely linked to the school environment and, although it is quite distinct from school belonging, it is especially relevant within the belonging literature (Allen & Boyle, in press;Furlong et al., 2014). As a multidimensional construct, different types of engagement have been recognised. ...
... The 'Clap for Our Carers' campaign [9] received wide recognition during the global pandemic COVID-19 [31], where people expressed thanks to key workers by clapping or making noises every week [13]. Gratitude has been defined variously in literature [20,37,40]. It generally involves positive emotions in response to benefits received from others [6] or appreciation of various positive aspects of one's life [3,37]. ...
... Instead, rather than teaching for or against humility, educators should help students consider how it has been and can be contentious in its implications (given the politics of humility) among reasonable, diverse members of a community (Jackson, 2019). Asking school students to keep gratitude journals has become increasingly common as a Positive Psychology Intervention (PPI) (Krakauer et al., 2017;Roth et al., 2017) to the extent that it may appear to many schoolteachers a practice that is beyond question. In similar ways to this uncritical acceptance in schools of gratitude as a virtue, there is potential for humility to likewise be entrenched through positive education packages for wellbeing, which paradoxically risk harming some students who may be implicitly asked in this case to be ever humbler no matter what (Jackson, 2020). ...
... Gratitude or thankfulness has been highlighted as one of the most influential constructs in positive psychology and is mentioned as one of 24 "strengths of character" in Peterson and Seligman's Manual of Sanities (2004). Gratitude is associated with high welfare, and a sense of purpose, and satisfaction with life (Froh and Bono, 2011;Froh, Yurkewicz, and Kashdan, 2009;McCullough, Emmons, and Tsang, 2002). ...
