Gratitude and happiness: Development of a measure of gratitude and relationships with subjective well-being

By P. Watkins, Kathrane Woodward, Tamara Stone, Russell Kolts. 2003

1,014 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The purpose of these studies was to develop a valid measure of trait gratitude, and to evaluate the relationship of gratitude to subjective well-being (SWB). Four studies were conducted evaluating the reliability and validity of the Gratitude Resentment and Appreciation Test (GRAT), a measure of dispositional gratitude. This measure was shown to have good internal consistency and temporal stability. The GRAT was shown to relate positively to various measures of SWB. In two experiments, it was shown that grateful thinking improved mood, and results also supported the predictive validity of the GRAT. These studies support the theory that gratitude is an affective trait important to SWB.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a73d058f94bda44815c8d71c99380acfef8fe74

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Citations in the corpus

The debt of gratitude: Dissociating gratitude and indebtedness (2006, background): “The GQ-6 (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002), and the GRAT (Watkins et al., 2003), are developed trait gratitude measures that appear to have good psychometric properties.”
Gratitude and Well‐Being: Who Benefits the Most from a Gratitude Intervention? (2011, background): “Watkins et al. (2003) randomly assigned participants to one of four conditions.”
Developing autonomous learning in first year university students using perspectives from positive psychology (2013, neutral): “Gratitude is defined as a character strength involving appreciation and thankfulness, and operates as a moral or pro-social affect or personality trait (Hershberger 2005; McCullough, Emmons, and Tsang 2002; McCullough et al. 2001; Miller 1995; Watkins et al. 2003).”
A new approach to measuring moral virtues: The Multi-Component Gratitude Measure (2017, background): “Take, for example, the GRAT;Watkins et al. (2003) appear to define gratitude in ‘benefit-triggered’ terms, referring to Guralnik's (1971, p. 327) definition of gratitude as ‘a feeling of thankful appreciation for favours received’ (see Lambert et al., 2009).”
Forgiveness, Gratitude, and Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Affect and Beliefs (2009, background): “In other words, with few exceptions (Krause and Ellison 2003; Rye et al. 2001; Toussaint et al. 2001; Watkins et al. 2003; Emmons and McCullough 2003) the majority of the research seems to focus on the potential for forgiveness and gratitude to prevent the negative instead of promote the positive ”
Joy is a distinct positive emotion: Assessment of joy and relationship to gratitude and well-being (2018, background): “These correlations provide preliminary evidence that joy may be and Appreciation Test, Short Version (GRAT-S; Watkins et al., 2003).”
Is gratitude an alternative to materialism? (2006, methodology): “Researchers conducting experimental work along these lines might try to induce gratitude using methods developed by McCraty et al. (1995), Watkins et al. (2003), Jackson et al. (2001), or Dunn and Schweitzer (2005).”
Can Gratitude and Kindness Interventions Enhance Well-Being in a Clinical Sample? (2015, background): “Relatively consistently, gratitude interventions have been demonstrated to have a positive impact on affect (Watkins et al. 2003; Emmons and McCullough 2003; Seligman et al. 2005; Sheldon and Lyubomirsky 2006).”
Counting your blessings: Positive memories among grateful persons (2004, methodology): “Factor analysis of the Gratitude, Resentment, and Appreciation Test (GRAT), a trait gratitude measure with good psychometric properties, has supported this three-factor structure of gratitude ( Watkins et al., in press ).”
Appreciation: a spiritual path to finding value and meaning in the workplace (2012, background): “( 2003 ) examined the effect of thinking about, writing an essay about, or writing a letter to “someone for whom they were grateful”.”
Taking care of business? Grateful processing of unpleasant memories (2008, methodology): “Several measures of trait gratitude have been developed (McCullough et al., 2002; Watkins et al., 2003) and we sought to further test the validity of the revised Gratitude, Resentment, and Appreciation Test (GRAT-R; Thomas & Watkins, 2003; McComb et al., 2004).”
Conceptualizing gratitude and appreciation as a unitary personality trait (2008, neutral): “Three measures of gratitude and appreciation have been developed: the unidimensional GQ6 (McCullough et al., 2002), the multidimensional Appreciation Scale (Adler & Fagley, 2005), and the multidimensional GRAT (Watkins et al., 2003).”
The Effect of Gratitude on Elementary School Students’ Subjective Well-Being in Schools: The Mediating Role of Prosocial Behavior (2015, background): “Some scholars believe there is no connection between gratitude and negative affect (McCullough et al. 2002; Watkins et al. 2003).”
Grateful recounting enhances subjective well-being: The importance of grateful processing (2015, background): “Because trait gratitude is reliably lower in men than women (e.g. Watkins et al., 2003), and studies have found that men report fewer benefits derived from gratitude (Kashdan, Mishra, Breen, & Froh, 2009), it could be argued that gratitude treatments might be less effective with men than women.”