Longitudinal relationships between gratitude, deliberate rumination, and posttraumatic growth in adolescents following the Wenchuan earthquake in China

Abstract

To examine the longitudinal relationship between gratitude, deliberate rumination and posttraumatic growth (PTG) in the adolescent survivors after the Wenchuan earthquake, 217 adolescent survivors were randomly selected from several primary and secondary schools in the county of Wenchuan, and were assessed by questionnaires at three and a half years (T1), four and a half years (T2), five and a half years (T3) after the Wenchuan earthquake, respectively. The results found that there was a one-way predictive relationship of gratitude onto PTG from T1 to T3, and gratitude predicted deliberate rumination from T1 to T2 but not T2 to T3. Deliberate rumination only had a significant positive effect on PTG from T2 to T3, and PTG only predicted deliberate rumination from T1 to T2. These results indicated that gratitude could be a stable predictive factor for the development of PTG, and gratitude could also affect PTG by deliberate rumination. In addition, the predictive effect between deliberate rumination and PTG is unstable with time change.

Gratitude, Psychopathology and Subjective Well-Being: Results from a 7.5-Month Prospective General Population Study

“…However, the study by Wood et al (2008a) specifically focused on the mechanics of gratitude during a life transition, and the study sample therefore consisted of first year undergraduate students (18-19 years old) who had just started their studies, whereas the current study was performed in a large, demographically diverse general population sample without a specific focus on life events. The discrepancy in findings between Wood et al's study (2008a) and ours may therefore suggest that the protective impact of gratitude on psychopathology is possibly more apparent in the context of a stressful life event, during which an individual undergoes changes in levels of mental health (Wheaton 1990), as further evidenced by longitudinal studies linking gratitude to post-traumatic growth (Tsai et al 2016;Zhou and Wu 2015), and long-term survivorship in cancer patients (Hulett et al 2015). Further longitudinal studies are needed, however, to systematically map the mechanics of gratitude in the context of adjustment and resilience to adversity.…”

“…Indeed, the uncorrected prospective effect of gratitude on well-being was substantially larger (b = .29, see Table 1), although still moderate at most. In comparison, the only study on gratitude and mental health with a comparable multi-wave study design and data analysis, although not applying correction for demographic factors, reported SEM path coefficients between gratitude and post-traumatic growth in the range of .12 to .15 (Zhou and Wu 2015), considered small by convention (Hu and Bentler 1999). Moreover, a recent meta-analysis (Davis et al 2016) concluded the overall effect of gratitude interventions on well-being to range from moderate (Cohen's d = .31) to weak (Cohen's d = .14) in size, depending on control conditions, in line with a previous meta-analysis by Bolier et al (2013), showing on average small effects of positive psychology interventions on wellbeing (Cohen's d = .20).…”

“…However, although a number of studies, both cross-sectional and longitudinal, have linked the grateful trait negatively to measures of psychopathology (Kleiman et al 2013;Krause 2009;Lies et al 2014;Petrocchi and Couyoumdjian 2016;Wood et al 2008a), and other studies have reported positive associations between gratitude and measures of well-being (Chaves et al 2015;Gillham et al 2011;Kong et al 2015;Szcześniak and Soares 2011;Thrash et al 2010;Tsai et al 2016;Watkins et al 2003;Zhou and Wu 2015), no studies to date have examined relations between the grateful trait and both dimensions of mental health together. Our understanding of the grateful trait's contribution to mental health remains, therefore, incomplete, and calls for additional prospective examination of how gratitude impacts on the combinedly assessed dimensions of psychopathology and subjective well-being.…”

“…In addition, the majority of studies on the relationship between gratitude and mental health were carried out among adolescent (mainly student) convenience samples (Gillham et al 2011;Kleiman et al 2013;Kong et al 2015;Petrocchi and Couyoumdjian 2016;Watkins et al 2003;Wood et al 2008a), among elderly individuals (Krause 2009), or among individuals within a particular psychological context, such as earthquake survivors (Lies et al 2014;Zhou and Wu 2015), military veterans (Tsai et al 2016), breast cancer survivors (Hulett et al 2015), or children with a life threatening illness (Chaves et al 2015). It remains uncertain to what extent the results produced by these studies reflect general patterns at the population level.…”

Correlatos Valorativos Do Crescimento Pós-Traumático Em Uma Amostra Brasileira

“…Vivenciam emoções positivas que se alarguem o repertorio de ações, pensamentos e otimismo durante o tempo de adaptação (Fredrickson, 2004). Os resultados de um estudo longitudinal com adolescentes chineses sobreviventes de terremoto sugerem que a gratidão é um fator preditivo estável para o desenvolvimento do crescimento pós-traumático (Zhou & Wu, 2015).…”