Research On The Intervention Of Primary School Children's Gratitude, Helping Behavior And Their Relationships

Gratitude ability is an important aspect of the development of children's socialcognition.Also,it plays an important role in positive psychology. The psychologistsbegan a series of empirical researches on gratitude ability in later20thcentury, butdomestic studies are still at an early stage. In view of it, this study used the in-situexperiments to discuss the development of gratitude ability among the primary schoolchildren. Helping behavior as an important aspect of children's social development isclosely related with ability of gratitude.Also it is a typical representative of thepro-social behavior. Although many researchers study gratitude and helping behavior,they debate on the age trends, gender differences and the relationship of them. Weadministered Field Experiment to investigate the development of primary schoolchildren's ability of helping behavior and the relationship between gratitude and helpingbehavior.Based on these, according to the experimental results of gratitude and helpingbehavior,we intervened gratitude ability of Four-grade for twelve weeks by using theway of counting blessing and watching Thanksgiving video. In order to providescientific material to the research of gratitude ability, deep our theory and relatedresearch of gratitude ability, improve the gratitude ability among the pupils.It had two studies in this thesis. In study1, the Field Experiment wasadministered to explore the development of gratitude ability and helping behavior in151primary school children (54in grade2,49in grade4,48in grade6). The majorfindings were as follows: First, the primary school children's ability of gratitude,gratitude cognition, gratitude disposition did not develop apparently with age, buttortuous developed with a key turning point of the age. Grade two to Grade four periods,gratitude ability maintained the fast growth, but Grade four to Grade six periods,primary school children's ability continued to decline.Second, the primary schoolchildren's helping behavior developed apparently with age. Four-grade may be asignificant point for the development of primary school children's helping behavior.Third, there were no gender differences on the primary school children's ability of gratitude and helping behavior. Forth, by means of regression analysis, gratitudecognition was measurable to the prediction of helping behavior.In Study2, according to the results of study1, we intervened gratitude ofFour-grade (49) for twelve weeks by using the way of counting blessing and watchingThanksgiving video. Through the intervention of gratitude, the results showed: First,after the intervention, the primary school children's ability of gratitude,gratitudecognition and gratitude disposition significantly improved than before; Second, after theintervention,the primary school children's helping behavior improved a little thanbefore,but not significantly; Third, after the intervention, gratitude cognition wasmeasurable to the prediction of helping behavior.