Here we did a study, we tried to induce gratitude in our participants; get them to be more
grateful. Gratitude is defined by Bob Emmons, who is he’s the world’s expert
on gratitude, so, he’s amazing. He defines gratitude a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness
and appreciation for life. I am not actually going to go into this very much but, in terms
of the question of: “Why do we think that gratitude and appreciation would make people
happier? I think there are lots, and lots of answers to that—gratitude helps us savour
positive experiences, it leads us to be more helpful, it prevents us from taking things
for
granted; gratitude also neutralizes negative emotions. You know, it’s almost impossible
to feel grateful and the same time to feel greedy, or envious, or bitter, or anxious,
right,
it’s sort of, a neutralizer of negative emotions. So, many, many reasons why becoming
more grateful would lead people to become happier.
Okay so, in this study, very simple study—
Participants were instructed to count their blessings, to keep a gratitude journal for
six
(6) weeks. We have three groups—in one group we had people count their blessing once
a week, so, every Sunday night write down what you are grateful for, or three times
a
week, every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, and we had a control group that didn’t do
anything. Now, we have other studies where we have much better control groups, but in
these particular ones we just have a control group that we just follow across time.
Okay so, the instructions were: there are many things in our lives both large and
small that we might be grateful about—think back through the events of the past week,
and write down up to five (5) things for which you are grateful. And I’ll give you some
examples of what students listed.
You’ll be happy to know that by far, by far, by far the most common response was
“Mom.” Dads, I should say, Dads were mentioned as well, just not as commonly. Sorry.
There’s this one woman who kept talking about lotion; it turned out that she had a
skin
condition, and she found this lotion that really helped, and she was really grateful
for it.
And gratitude often is about appreciating those little things that we take for granted,
the
comforts that we take for granted. It is actually amazing how fast—I actually remember,
what was it, maybe a couple of months ago I went to Wells Fargo, which is my bank, and
I discovered that you know, you don’t have to use those envelopes anymore to deposit
checks. I mean it’s just amazing. You just go put the check right in there, it scans
it for
you, it gives you a picture of the check—and I was so happy, I thought this was great.
But, it took me what like, a day you know, an hour to totally take that for granted,
you
know, and then get used to that. And now I just expect that every time I go to the ATM
that I could do this, right. So, we just take this for granted so quickly and easily that
we really need to put effort into not taking it for granted, to try and appreciate, and
be
grateful for those things, even when they are little things—and the big things of
course as
well.
We measured happiness by using several validated scales of well-being,
where we just asked people in general: “How happy do you consider yourself?” This is
a four-item scale; this is also in my book. Here is a scale that measures life satisfaction,
which is just one item: “How do feel about your life right now, is it terrible, are you
delighted with it?” It is called the “terrible / delighted” scale. I kinda like it; although
it
only has one item, which is a little bit problematic. Okay, so, we had several scales we
used. So, first we wanted to see: were we successful in inducing gratitude? And we were.
But, look at what happened, this—
these bars represent changes in gratitude and gratefulness from before the six (6) week
intervention to after and people did become more grateful after the intervention, but
only
in the condition—only those people, those participants who counted their blessings once
a week, you see, they increased their gratitude. People who did it three times a week
and the control group, there was no change in gratitude, so, we’ll sort of, talk about
that.
Now the key variable is happiness, so, lets see what happened there.
Okay so, we were successful in getting people to become happier just in these six (6)
weeks—by the way this is a really trivial intervention, I mean, they’re just writing
down
five (5) things that they’re grateful for. Imagine any other intervention in your life
like,
spending time with friends, or working out at the gym, or you know, going to see a
therapist, that is a lot more time then just a few minutes a week. We were able to get—
we were successful in getting people to become happier, but only for those participants
who counted their blessings once a week. Now, notice that the control group actually got
less happy and I can talk about that later—basically, because this is a student sample, we
found that with students, they always start the quarter of the semester really “gung
ho,”
and enthusiastic, and happy, and then they get less happy as, sort of, they have to start
working doing their homework, and having mid-terms, and papers.
But anyway, it only worked for the once a week counting blessing condition, not
the three times a week. So, why is that? I’d love to hear you thoughts, maybe after the
talk. Basically we felt that—now this is on average—this is not true for everyone,
we
felt that having people count their blessings three times a week was just too much, that
perhaps it became kind of a chore for them, maybe monotonous, maybe they had trouble
thinking of things to be grateful for? Once a week was just perfect. Some people come
to me and they say, “But, you know, I do this everyday, and it really works.” And
I say,
“That’s good, because one of the themes of my book and of my research is that fit
is
critical, that for some people, counting your blessings everyday might be as effective.”
found in that study, on average, it was once a week.