Gratitude is a prototypical emotional response when life’s blessings come from the intentional goodwill of other people, but many also attribute good experiences to the intervention of God, gods, a Higher Power, or other benevolent spiritual forces. This study investigated the differences between how United States participants (N = 610) experience interpersonal gratitude and spiritual gratitude. Compared to interpersonal gratitude, spiritual gratitude experiences were less often attributed to human action, more often attributed to supernatural beings and circumstances beyond human control, and elicited significantly less feelings of gratitude, indebtedness, and admiration, but greater awe. Participants reported the highest feelings of gratitude when they also believed in a personal God with a benevolent mind. These findings demonstrate the importance of perceiving benevolent agency in evoking feelings of gratitude, whereas experiences that are attributed to more abstract, less personified, or less external entities elicit a different profile of positive emotional responses.
Good fortune can be attributed to many sources, including other people, personal efforts, and various theistic and non-theistic supernatural forces (e.g., karma). Three studies (total N = 3,315) of religiously-diverse samples from the U.S. and U.K. investigated the distinct emotional reactions to recalled positive experiences attributed to natural and supernatural benefactors. We found that the hallmarks of interpersonal gratitude (e.g., thankfulness, admiration, indebtedness) were reported when believers attributed their good fortune to a personal, benevolent God. However, a distinct emotional profile arose when participants attributed good fortune to the process of karmic payback, which was associated with relatively less gratitude but with higher scores for feelings of pride and deservingness. These results were partially explained by participants’ attributions of positive experiences to an external agent (e.g., God) versus a universal law or internal factors as in the case of karma. We conclude that diverse beliefs about supernatural entities influence causal attributions for good fortune which, in turn, predict distinct emotional responses.
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