The Impact Of Gratitude On Negative Reciprocity

As positive psychology becomes popular,gratitude is drawing more attention by researchers.Gratitude is the positive emotion one feels when another person has intentionally given,or attempted to give,one something of value.We will respond in the way of “tit for tit” when we recognized others' hostile,which was called negative reciprocity in the interpersonal relationship.Related studies found that positive emotions can reduce individual negative reciprocity.Gratitude as a kind of positive emotion can also reduce the harm of interpersonal behavior and aggressive behavior,but former researches were only limited to the interactions between the benefactors and beneficiary.Few researches directly studied the influence of gratitude on negative reciprocity,and differed the influence of gratitude from the influence of general positive emotion on negative reciprocity.Even less study focused on the negative reciprocity between benefactors and beneficiary.After a review of related literature,this paper,based on the Moral Affect Theory and the Broaden-and-build Theory,focused on the influence of gratitude in negative reciprocity,differs the effect of general positive emotion,and discussed the effect of gratitude on negative reciprocity between beneficiary and strangers.This paper proposed that gratitude can decrease the degree of negative reciprocity,and this decrease differs from the effect of general positive emotion.In addition gratitude can also decrease negative reciprocity between beneficiary and strangers.113 college students and graduate students took part in two experiments.Behavioral method was used to explore the influence of gratitude on negative reciprocity,which uses human interaction paradigm to induce gratitude.Results showed that:(1)negative reciprocity in a gratitude emotion state was significantly lower than that in a positive emotion state and was also significantly lower than that in a neutral emotion state,and negative reciprocity difference between a positive emotion state and a neutral emotion state was not significant;(2)negative reciprocity in a gratitude emotion state with strange negative reciprocity object was significantly lower than that in a neutral emotion state,and negative reciprocity difference between a gratitude emotion state with strange negative reciprocity object and a gratitude emotion state with benefactor was not significant.The conclusion is that gratitude can decrease negative reciprocity between the benefactor and beneficiary or other strangers,and this decrease differed from generalpositive emotion.