Find, remind, blind? Support as a context for the adaptive nature of gratitude

ABSTRACT

Extant literature often assumes that gratitude is intrinsically positive therefore ought to be maximized. Virtue theory and social alignment theory, however, suggest gratitude is adaptive only in specific relational contexts. Drawing from find-remind-bind theory’s notion that gratitude functions to promote interactions with supportive partners in particular, we test whether it is not just the overall level of gratitude and support that bear upon personal (psychological well-being, physical health) and relational (commitment, sexual satisfaction, aggression) outcomes, but also congruence in levels of gratitude for one’s partner relative to the support they provide. Drawing from a cross-sectional survey of 874 mixed-sex married dyads (N = 1,748) in the United States, we demonstrate that gratitude for a partner in excess of the support that partner provides is associated with maladaptive personal and relational outcomes. Implications and future directions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Gratitude
• support
• support matching
• couples
• well-being
• psychological well-being
• physical health
• commitment
• sexual satisfaction
• aggression

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability

Data that support the findings of this study, along with the analytic code, are available at: https://osf.io/y6ufz/.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2022.2036797.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/Y6UFZ.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. We recognize that discretizing results in information loss, and therefore may seem objectionable. We report the results of the study using continuous moderation analyses between gratitude and support on outcomes in online supplemental materials. However, we again note that moderation analyses are not appropriate for testing the hypothesis that tuning gratitude to the level of support in a relationship implicates on outcomes.

2. Husband and wife reports of length of time married did not always match. Statistics reported here reflect the average of husband and wife responses.

3. Although the terms Excessive Gratitude and Deficient Gratitude are value-laden, we opted to use them because they succinctly and intuitively communicate the level of gratitude to support represented in each group.

Additional information

Funding

The data for this study was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship Award issued to the first author by Brigham Young University’s Graduate Studies Office in 2014.