The Scale And Experimental Researches Of Gratitude Of College Students

The present study is about gratitude. It consists of six correlated researches and includes 1394 participants.Purposes:(1) Developes a measure of gratitude that adapts to Chinese culture and can provides imformation about the structure of gratitude. (2) Explores the relationship between the two emotions:gratitude and appreciation. (3) Examines how motive, cost and significance influence gratitude. (4) Checks whether gratitude is positive or negative. (5) Finds whether there is gender difference of gratitude.Method:(1) On the base of paper research and opened questionare, the study advances a theory of the structure of gratitude and constructs a measure of grateful trait. (2) By the way of questionare, the study uses Structural Equation Modeling to analyse the structure of gratitude and appreciation. (3) By designed a 2X2X2 between subjective experiment, the study explores how motive, cost and significance influence gratitude. (4) In order to examine the broaden-and-build effect of gratitude, the study also designs another experiment to induce three different emotions:pleasure, hate and gratitude.Thus, whether gratitude is positive or negative can be clear by compare it's effect with other emotions.Results:(1) The measure we developed turn out that it has a good validation and reliability, it also supports that grateful trait is consist of cognitive component, affective component and behavioural component. (2) Gratitude is different from appreciation, but they belong to a same affective trait called grateful trait. (3) Motive, cost and significane influence people's gratitude, but no interaction is found. However, indebtness is found influence by the interaction between cost and significance, and the interaction between cost and motive. (4) There are significant difference between males and females. Females are found more grateful than males in total level and every dimension. And this can be explained by the fuction of culture in shaping gender roles. (5) The study also finds that gratitude is not a simple positive affection. It may be a mixture of positive emotions and negative emotions.