Effects of gratitude on subjective well-being, self-construal, and memory

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of induced gratitude on subjective well-being and self-construal. A gratitude letter manipulation was predicted to produce greater positive affect, satisfaction with life, and happiness scores and lower levels of negative affect than a neutral affect condition. The gratitude manipulation was also expected to result in more relational self-descriptive statements and greater recall of relational information compared to the neutral affect condition. Eighty-six college students were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions. The gratitude condition involved composing a letter to someone who made a major positive difference in their lives. The neutral affect condition involved listing the places they were and the routes they took in the previous day. Participants engaged in a memory task after the gratitude manipulation in which they viewed twenty relational and twenty non-relational statements about a college student and listed the statements they recalled eight minutes after the exposure. Prior to the manipulation, chronic relational self-construal and trait gratitude were measured. Analyses did not reveal a main effect of a condition on momentary gratitude, subjective well-being, self-descriptive statements, or type of information recalled in the memory task. Higher chronic relational self-construal was associated with greater positive affect. Greater trait gratitude was associated with higher momentary gratitude, satisfaction with life, and happiness. Higher trait gratitude was associated with lower negative affect. There was an interaction of condition and trait gratitude in predicting negative affect. In the gratitude manipulation condition, participants who were low on trait gratitude had more negative affect than those who were high on trait gratitude. In contrast, participants in the comparison condition did not differ in their negative affect as a function of their trait gratitude. Higher chronic relational self-construal was associated with more relational statements recalled. Higher trait gratitude predicted more non-relational statements recalled. Results indicate that both trait gratitude and chronic self-construal are associated with subjective well-being as well as with type of information recalled. Methodological considerations for the gratitude letter manipulation are discussed.