Modifying interpretation bias leads to congruent changes in gratitude

ABSTRACT

In this study we used Cognitive Bias Modification to modify interpretation biases hypothesized to influence gratitude. Participants were randomly allocated to either a gratitude or a comparison non-gratitude training condition in which they were guided to disambiguate 80 ambiguous scenarios in terms of whether the reader perceived themselves as having benefited – or not – from help provided by another person. Following training, those allocated to the grateful condition made more interpretations of positive benefit when reading new ambiguous test scenarios than those in the comparison condition. Furthermore, participants in the gratitude training condition rated real personal events as having significantly greater benefit value and altruism of the benefactor. Finally, those in the grateful training condition showed greater post-training ratings of gratitude, increased joy, and decreased negative affect. We conclude that interpretations of benefit can be modified by training, and that enhanced benefit interpretations lead to congruent changes in gratitude.

KEYWORDS:

• Gratitude
• positive emotion
• cognitive bias modification
• interpretation bias

Acknowledgments

A portion of this study was presented at the 2020 convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://osf.io/k4xwy/.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. Cohen’s f(V). This equates to a small to medium effect size, whereas we obtained a large effect size.

2. Results of the analysis with the complete set of scenarios was essentially identical to this subset.