Why does a grateful mind prevent an aggressive hand? Perspective taking mediated the relation between gratitude and two types of aggression among individuals in the general population and prisoners

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that gratitude can reduce aggression via enhanced empathy. However, further research is needed to distinguish different subtypes of empathy and aggression, and to evaluate the relationship among highly aggressive individuals. The current study investigated the roles of two subtypes of empathy (perspective taking and empathic concern) in the relationship between gratitude and two subtypes of aggression (reactive and proactive aggressions) among general population (N = 363, Study 1) and male prisoners (N = 241, Study 2). In both studies, parallel mediational analyses supported that perspective taking, rather than empathic concern, plays a critical role in correlating gratitude with two subtypes of aggression. This effect was more significant in prisoners than in the community population. These findings enhance the understanding of the underlying mechanism linking gratitude to aggression and imply a new promising target for gratitude-based interventions to reduce aggression in prisoners.

KEYWORDS:

• Gratitude
• perspective taking
• empathic concern
• aggression
• prisoners

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2365257.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://osf.io/mxuda/?view_only=d9c93555ad614fa083cf6cde9186acda.

Additional information

Funding

Yichen Li and Shuang Zhang contributed equally to this work. This work was supported by the Beijing Municipal Education Commission [grant numbers KM202210028001]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 32200896]; Youth Research Support Project of Capital Normal University [grant numbers 24551310005].