Gratitude: A New Field Of Psychological Research

The word gratitude is derived from the Latin gratia, meaning favor and pleasing.Gratitude has been defined in a number ways by philosophers, anthropologists,sociologists and psychologists throughout history. We suggest that gratitude is a positiveemotion and an impulse which emerges when a beneficiary receives benevolence andwhich prompts him to reward others for the received benevolence. In the history of ideas, the concept of gratitude has had a long life span, but in thehistory of psychology a relatively short past. The ideaistic foundations of gratitude canbe traced back to Seneca. He began his inquiry into gratitude by noting that gratitudemust be understood as part of a dyadic relationship between a giver of benefits and areceiver of benefits. Adam Smith is the first ideologist who explored psychology ofgratitude in history. According to Smith, gratitude is the sentiment that prompts us toreward others for the good that they have done us. Kant defined gratitude as "a debt ofhonor…… honoring a person because of a kindness he has done us." According to Bahya,the idea that gratitude to other human beings is one pathway to develop an attitude ofgratitude toward God. The emerging of any new field has its profound historical background. Thephilosophical context of contemporary gratitude research is postmodernism. Influencedby postmodernism, psychologists suggest that psychology should be a science that canhelp our development, psychological research should be diversification and focus on thefields that are related with people's lives. Psychological context are the corner of thenegative psychology and the emerging of positive psychology. Up to now, there still isn't a clear concept and a systematic theory of gratitude.Contemporary theories of gratitude mainly are cognitive-emotion theory, affectiveexperience theory, broaden and build theory, and moral affect theory. And the mainfields of contemporary research on gratitude including, gratitude speech act, gratitudeand personality, gratitude and well-being, gratitude and health. Gratitude research is part of the growing field of positive psychology, whichfocuses on the strengths and virtues of human beings. Gratitude research has somestrengths, at the same time it has some weaknesses. Its strengths are as follows, makingcontribution to research on altruistic act, stressing the positive emotion, proposing sometheories of gratitude and emphasizing practising of gratitude education. And thefollowing are its weaknesses, concept of gratitude is obscurely defined, the researchoverly depends on psychometry, the field of research on gratitude is relatively limited.