A Research On Group Gratitude Intervention In Promoting The Subjective Well-being Of The Senior High School Students

Gratitude is one of the most important human virtues, which is a grateful emotion producedwhen individuals get positive benefaction. Gratitude, a positive personality trait, is a psychologicaltendency to experience grateful emotions. Not only are gratitude and individual positive emotionhappiness closely related, but it also has significant prediction function in the happiness. The recentstudies abroad show that gratitude intervention can effectively change and improve the level ofindividual happiness.Though gratitude education is a Chinese traditional virtue education, with its content outdatedand its form too simple, nowadays, the problem that some youth lack the gratitude consciousnessgradually appears. The existing research primarily shows that people promote and develop theawareness of gratitude consciousness when they are young, which is the key period. However, there isconsiderable lack of researches into the teenagers’ gratitude at home and abroad.Affected by rapid development of the positive psychology, the mental health education in middleand primary schools will consider each student’s positive psychological quality as the main targets,focusing on the merits and virtues of human nature. The group intervention of improving gratitudeemotions in high school students is completely new. This research makes an attempt to focus ongratitude characteristics and design group counseling curriculums so that we can provide the schoolswith some practical practices in promoting high schools students’ gratitude and subjective well-being.157students from three classes of two different provincial demonstrative high schools in PanyuGuangdong have participated in the research. Using “General Well-Being Schedule” and "TheCollege Students Happiness Schedule " as well as “The Group Psychological Counseling Assessment”as the research tools, we apply different experiment designs before and after the experiment, based onGratitude intervention plan one (combining group counseling with filial piety moral educationactivities) and intervention plan two (filial piety moral education activities). The dependent variable isgratitude and subjective well-being level.Group intervention, including gratitude mood, gratitude cognition, gratitude behavior and coursewas structured and developing. With eight themes “Getting to know gratitude, Experience beauty,Positive cognition, Difficulty relief thinking, Taking care of yourself, The initiative coping,Expressing gratitude, Review and expectation”, organization and activity, once a week, each time40minutes (8times for90minutes). The research explored the gratitude through eight activities,including psychological measurement, gratitude meditation, gratitude records, positive thinking,gratitude expression, accepting ourselves, mature coping, practice activities.In order to promote the filial piety moral education, different activities are carried out every yearin the school, such as filial piety exhibition, filial piety sketch, recitation, collecting essays,"filialpiety" star competition, volunteer service, etc., all based on the experience of family—responsibility—community service—contributing to our country.The results showed that group gratitude intervention has positive effect on improving high schoolstudents’ subjective well-being. It is worthwhile to promote the research result among high schools. Itproves that moral education activity is the necessary supplement to psychological guidance in groupgratitude and it is also an effective combination of mental health education and moral education inschool. They work efficiently together so as to enhance the high school students subjectivewell-being.