Who benefits the most from a gratitude intervention in children and adolescents? Examining positive affect as a moderator

Abstract

To date, nearly half of the work supporting the efficacy of gratitude interventions did so by making contrasts with techniques that induce negative affect (e.g., record your daily hassles). Gratitude interventions have shown limited benefits, if any, over control conditions. Thus, there is a need to better understand whether gratitude interventions are beyond a control condition and if there exists a subset of people who benefit. People high in positive affect (PA) may have reached an ‘emotional ceiling’ and, thus, are less susceptible to experiencing gains in well-being. People lower in PA, however, may need more positive events (like expressing gratitude to a benefactor) to ‘catch up’ to the positive experiences of their peers. We examined if PA moderated the effects of a gratitude intervention where youth were instructed to write a letter to someone whom they were grateful and deliver it to them in person. Eighty-nine children and adolescents were randomly assigned to the gratitude intervention or a control condition. Findings indicated that youth low in PA in the gratitude condition, compared with youth writing about daily events, reported greater gratitude and PA at post-treatment and greater PA at the 2-month follow-up.

Keywords:

• gratitude
• intervention
• positive affect
• children
• adolescents

Acknowledgements

Gratitude is extended to Pastor Salvatore Greco and the teachers Heidi Nilsen, Nancy Saponieri, and Fran Teruta for their support with data collection. Thanks go to Noel A. Card for statistical consultation, Jennifer Wilson, Lisa Wajsblat, and Jessica Glowacki for their assistance in the preparation stages, and several anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Todd B. Kashdan was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grant MH-73937.

Notes

Notes

1. Although counting blessings has demonstrated some efficacy in increasing well-being in early adolescents (Froh et al., 2008), we tested a new gratitude intervention, and did not also assign counting blessings to a third group, for two reasons: (1) we hoped to provide evidence for another efficacious intervention for clinicians and intervention/prevention researchers who work with children and adolescents, and (2) given our limited participant pool, adding a third group to our study would have substantially lowered our already insufficient power.

2. We mailed the ‘completion of the gratitude intervention form’ home because the majority of the students said they were writing the letter to their parents. Furthermore, because we obtained active parental consent from every parent/guardian, we believed that the parents/guardians would know if their son or daughter read a gratitude letter to someone other than themselves.