Gratitude and Drug Misuse: Role of Coping as Mediator

ABSTRACT

Background: Positive emotions, such as gratitude has been found to be beneficial to both physical and mental well-being but so far, drug misuse research has yet to identify important emotive predictors related to drug use. Objectives: This study aimed to examine the relationship between gratitude and drug use among a group of drug misusers. It was hypothesized that greater dispositional gratitude was associated with lesser drug use through greater use of adaptive coping methods and lesser use of maladaptive coping methods. Methods: This study utilized a cross-sectional design to examine the relationship between gratitude, coping, and drug use among a sample of drug misusers (N = 105) at a drug rehabilitation center. Participants completed the gratitude questionnaire (GQ-6), the joy subscale of the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale (DPES), the Brief COPE, and a questionnaire on their drug use. Data were collected in 2015. Results: Mediation analysis supported the hypothesis and found that adaptive coping mediated the relationship between gratitude and drug use. However, mediation was not found for maladaptive coping. Additional analysis found that adaptive coping as a mediator was not found for joy. Conclusion: Results suggested that gratitude has utility in reducing drug use through the use of more adaptive coping strategies and this relationship was not simply due to positive affect. Interventions targeting drug use behavior could consider introducing gratitude to increase adaptive coping abilities to reduce drug use.

KEYWORDS:

• Coping
• drug misuse
• drug misuser
• drug use
• gratitude

Acknowledgment

This study was made possible with the approval of the Singapore Prison Service.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Notes

1 Carver (1997) does not propose any particular way of structuring higher order factors and recommends researchers to empirically determine the higher order factors that are unique to their own sample.