Mixed emotional variants of gratitude: antecedent situations, cognitive appraisals, action tendencies, and psychosocial outcomes

ABSTRACT

This research provides an exploratory investigation of whether gift/help-receiving contexts that elicit mixed emotional variants of gratitude can be distinguished from typical gratitude-eliciting situations in their associated appraisals, action tendencies, and psychosocial effects. We examined 473 participants (159 males, 312 females, 2 others; M_age = 31.07) using a one-way four-conditions between-subjects experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to complete recall tasks describing four different gratitude-eliciting situations. Emotions, cognitive appraisals, action tendencies, and general psychosocial outcomes were assessed. Relative to a control condition involving receiving a gift or help (gift/help condition), receiving something at the expense of a benefactor (benefactor-inconvenience condition) elicited gratitude-guilt; receiving something with an expectation of return (return-favour condition) elicited gratitude-disappointment and gratitude-anger; while receiving a disliked gift or receiving assistance that made things worse (backfire condition) primarily elicited gratitude-disappointment while also eliciting gratitude-anger and gratitude-guilt. Each condition was differentiable from control in their appraisals, action tendencies, and psychosocial effects. Notably, contexts which elicited mixed emotional variants of gratitude were characterised by the co-occurrence of conflicting appraisals such as pleasantness and unpleasantness or goal-congruence and goal-incongruence. Additionally, the return-favour and backfire conditions were most dissimilar from control, and were associated with the most negative action tendencies and psychosocial outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Gratitude
• appraisal theory
• emotion-specificity
• mixed emotions
• emotional ambivalence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 With few exceptions, the reported Bayes Factors are largely in line with results based on p-values. However, the following variables with significant p-values had Bayes Factors lower than 1 (indicative of support for the null hypothesis), thus necessitating interpretive caution: MIN for expectedness and unexpectedness, MIN for moral legitimacy and moral illegitimacy, MIN for self-agency and circumstances-agency, as well as other-control appraisals and circumstances-control appraisals.

2 Several of the narratives in the backfire condition included individuals feeling bad for not appreciating what the benefactor was doing while being upset that the benefactor caused an unwanted outcome, which is consistent with the activation of both moral legitimacy and moral illegitimacy appraisals.