Rx for Life: Gratitude

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"Psychology has generally ignored the positive emotions," says Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, a psychologist and leading figure in the new field of gratitude research. "We tend to study the things that can go wrong in people's minds but not the things that can go right. Gratitude research is beginning to suggest that feelings of thankfulness have tremendous positive value in helping people cope with daily problems, especially stress, and to achieve a positive sense of the self."

Emmons notes that grateful people are not ones who take a Pollyannaish view of the world. In studies, people who score highly on various indicators of gratefulness also report strong awareness of the bad in their own lives and in society. In fact, some research finds that grateful people may be slightly more likely to be cynical than the population as a whole. But they achieve the ability to be wary of life's problems and yet thankful for the ways in which the actions of others lighten their burdens.

Adam Smith, in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments," supposed that people who did not feel gratitude were only cheating themselves out of happiness in life.

Grateful people are not necessarily ones whom the world has showered with gifts; people of modest financial means or who have suffered personal tragedies nevertheless may report themselves as grateful, while the well-to-do and good-looking may exhibit little gratitude.

"To say we feel grateful is not to say that everything in our lives is necessarily great," Emmons says. "It just means we are aware of our blessings. If you only think about your disappointments and unsatisfied wants, you may be prone to unhappiness. If you're fully aware of your disappointments but at the same time thankful for the good that has happened and for your chance to live, you may show higher indices of well-being."

Psychologist Dan McAdams of Northwestern University, whose specialty is well-being research, says he recently became interested in gratitude when he saw studies suggesting that increasing a person's sense of thankfulness could lead to lower stress and better life "outcomes," meaning success in career and relationships. "Psychologists have tended to look down their nose at gratitude as little more than a question of having good manners and remembering to say thank you," McAdams says. Gratitude isn't even listed in the 1999 addition of the presumably encyclopedic "Encyclopedia of Human Emotions," a standard psychology text. "But if a sense of thankfulness can turn someone's life from bitter to positive, that makes gratitude an important aspect of psychology," McAdams notes.

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