Writing about gratitude increases emotion-regulation efficacy

ABSTRACT

Gratitude has gained attention in the domain of positive emotion research given its important prosocial role in connecting us to others and fostering well-being. It remains less clear which mechanisms gratitude acts to promote benefits in people’s life. We considered emotional regulation as one of these main processes. Ninety participants were randomly assigned to one of the three groups: write and share gratitude stories, write gratitude stories, and write and share non-emotional routine situations. Participants were asked to write twice per week during four consecutive weeks after which they returned to the laboratory to perform an emotion reappraisal task. The groups that wrote about gratitude were more effective in applying emotion reappraisal than the control group, i.e. both demonstrated better down-regulation of negative images than the control group. The results of the current study demonstrate a positive effect of focusing on personal past experiences of gratitude on present emotion regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Gratitude
• reappraisal
• emotion regulation
• positive emotion

Acknowledgments

ACAG was supported by a CAPES Master Grant. CKN is supported by a scientific initiation grant (FAPESP 2016/19167-0). LMM is supported by a FAPESP Ph.D. Grant (2017/06136-2). TSHW is supported by a FAPESP fellowship 2017/00738-0. PSB is supported by a CNPq researcher fellowship (311641/20150-6) and CAPES – PRINT (Programa Institucional de Internacionalização; Grant # 88887.310255/2018-00).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contributions

ACAG and PSB developed the study concept and design. Data collection was performed by ACAG and CKN. ACAG, LMM and PSB performed the data analysis. All authors contributed to data interpretation. All authors contributed to manuscript writing and approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Open Practices Statement

Neither of the experiments reported in this article was formally pre-registered. Neither the data nor the materials have been made available on a permanent third-party archive; requests for the data or materials can be sent via email to the Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at [email protected].

Notes

1. Making the situation better includes up-regulation of positive images and down-regulation of negative images.

2. However, a tolerance for delayed responding was applied and participants who did not respond within 48 h were excluded from the study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [311641/20150-6];Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior [88887.310255/2018-00];Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo [2016/19167-0,2017/00738-0,2017/06136-2].