Context

Have you heard songs that include the word "thank you"?

Below, we invite you to listen to some examples …

Click on the icon to watch the video

MusicEvolution. (2014, January 10). Bon Jove – Thank You For Loving Me (Official Uncut Music Video) [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1ZFkmTHTQ0


Click on the icon to watch the video

AbbaVEVO (2010, 23 feb.) Abba - Thank You For The Music [Video File].
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dcbw4IEY5w


Click on the icon to watch the video

DidoVEVO. (2009, October 3). Dido – Thank You (Official Video) [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TO48Cnl66w


  • Why do you think it appears so often in music?

In this topic you will see that gratitude is a subject of study of positive psychology and a phenomenon that correlates very highly with happiness. The exercises will invite you to explore the role of gratitude in your life. We invite you to look for more songs related to the topic of gratitude.


Explanation

Think about today…

How many times have you said "thank you" today? How many times have you thanked someone?

It may be a social formalism, something we say so automatically that we almost do not realize it. But even so, when a person does not thank us, we notice it and it's usually uncomfortable.

When gratitude is more than an automatic reaction, when we feel truly grateful, we have a deep and powerful experience, which involves both our brain and our heart.

Gratitude is both a positive emotion, a strength of character, an affective experience, something we feel at different times; it can also be a trait, or a habit of a person who often feels and expresses gratitude.

4.1 The importance of gratitude in history and culture

Gratitude has been valued throughout history as an important virtue. Gratitude is given to many spiritual traditions such as Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity.

The word "gratitude" comes from the Latin gratia,  which means: favor, gift or pleasant. These words encompass gratitude: the realization that we receive "gifts" from life without necessarily having done something to deserve them. Also, feeling gratitude is pleasant, it makes us feel good (Emmons & Shelton, 2002).

Many classical authors talk about cultivating gratitude for individual and social well-being, and consider that gratitude contributes to personal happiness, to relationships with others and to the proper functioning of collective life. On a psychological level, gratitude has to do with a gratefulness and appreciation for life, and can be expressed towards other people, towards nature or God.

Abraham Maslow said that one of the characteristics of self-realized people (those who manage to develop their potential and achieve their most desired aspirations) was precisely the amazement and appreciation for life, and that the ability to feel and express gratitude is fundamental to emotional health (Emmons & Shelton, 2002).


4.2 Investigations on gratitude

As you know, positive psychology is the scientific study of well-being and what makes people live fully. Gratitude is one of the most important topics in positive psychology because it directly correlates to happiness. Many studies have found that people who feel and express more gratitude have higher levels of satisfaction and happiness.

One of the researchers who has most studied the subject of gratitude is Dr. Robert Emmons, a professor at the University of California, Davis (USA), along with his colleague Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami (USA). Dr. Emmons has discovered that cultivating gratitude can have a great positive impact on different areas of people's lives, from their relationships with others to their physical health.

Gratitude can relate to happiness in different ways (Watkins, Van Gelder, & Frías, 2009):

  • Happier people may pay more attention to good things and, therefore, feel more grateful.
  • Gratitude can improve social relationships and it is well established that good interpersonal relationships are an important predictor of happiness and help to manage stress better.
  • There is evidence that gratitude facilitates access to positive memories.

We can feel grateful with life, with God or with another person, but it is not possible to feel grateful with oneself. This makes gratitude different from other emotions: someone can get angry with himself, or vice versa, feel proud of himself, but not grateful to himself. Gratitude always implies the feeling of a gift, of having received something. These authors also point out that gratitude is a civic virtue, because when feeling grateful, the person is motivated to behave pro-socially or morally (concerned about others.)

4.3 Cultivating gratitude

As with other virtues and strengths, gratitude can be cultivated. We can all benefit from feeling and expressing our gratitude. Research has been done to see if certain exercises or positive interventions to promote gratitude have an impact on happiness.

The first of these positive interventions is about keeping a gratitude journal.

This exercise consists of having a notebook in which each night, before going to sleep, we write down what we feel grateful for that day; there are different variations.

Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson (2005) call the exercise ¨three good things¨ and you have to write what were the good things that happened throughout the day and why we think they happened.

Dr. Martin Seligman and his colleagues have found that a group of people suffering from depression markedly improved their symptoms by doing this exercise for a week.

Robert Emmons (2007) has studied the effects of an exercise called counting blessings, in which participants write, once a week, 5 things that they feel grateful for, for 10 weeks.

Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky has also studied gratitude journals, and she recommends writing between 3 and 5 things that one feels grateful for, either in the morning or in the evening, when one can take a few minutes of quiet to do so.

Their studies indicate that the desirable frequency is not the same for all people, generally it can be done once a week for several weeks, daily or three times a week; the important thing is that the exercise does not become routine, that it is a significant experience (Lyubomirsky, 2007.)

Gratitude visit

Another positive intervention is a gratitude visit and it consists of the following: think of someone with whom we feel grateful and to whom we have not expressed enough gratitude. Write them a letter in which we thank them and tell them exactly why we are grateful to them. Then we contact the person and invite them to meet with us. For example, to have a coffee or breakfast, without telling them the reason for the meeting (note: you do not have to send the letter by mail). When we meet up with that person, we read the letter aloud to them, and once read, we give it to them. Seligman's team of researchers (Seligman et al., 2005) found that conducting this gratitude visit also significantly decreased people's levels of depression and increased levels of happiness.

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) has studied gratitude as one of the forms of positivity. She proposes that we can have rituals of gratitude in our daily lives; for example:

  • Give thanks before eating, either aloud or silently.
  • Take a moment to express our appreciation and gratitude when something ends, be it a semester at school, a vacation or the end of the year (Fredrickson, 2009).

Fredrickson proposes different activities to cultivate gratitude, these consist of:

  1. Reminders or gratefulness portfolios. For example, make a collage or an album with images of people, experiences and things that we feel grateful for.
  2. Select images as screen savers on our computer, or put a phrase or a gratefulness poem.
  3. Have a souvenir box containing objects that represent gifts or blessings we have received.
  4. You can take advantage of social networks to share images and phrases that encourage gratitude; even apps have been developed with this objective.

We invite you to explore your favorite networks and see what is in them related to gratitude.


Closure

Feeling gratitude and expressing it can contribute significantly to our happiness. There are many ways to cultivate gratitude, think about those you already practice and try a new one of the ones mentioned in this topic.

  1. What role do you think gratitude plays in human relationships?
  2. Why is it so important in different philosophical and cultural traditions?

To finish this topic, we invite you to choose and listen to a song in which the theme of gratitude is central.

Below, review the Checkpoint:

Make sure you understand:

  • What gratitude is.
  • Why it relates to wellbeing
  • What can be done to cultivate gratitude?

References

  • Emmons, R.A. (2007). Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  • Emmons, R.A., & Crumpler, C.A. (2000). Gratitude as a human strength: Appraising the evidence.  Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 19, 56-69.
  • Emmons, R. A. & Shelton, C. (2002). Gratitude and the Science of Positive Psychology. In C.R. Snyder & S.J. López (Eds.), Handbook of Positive Psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Fredrickson, B. (2009). Positivity. New York, NY: Crown Publishers.
  • Lyubomirsky, S. (2007). The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. New York, NY: The Penguin Press.
  • Seligman, M.E.P., Steen, T., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions. American Psychologist, 60 (5), 410-421.
  • Watkins, P. C., Van Gelder, M. & Frías, A. (2009). Furthering the Science of Gratitude. In C.R. Snyder & S.J. López (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (pp. 437-446). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.