Unique Cognitive and Emotional Profiles of Interpersonal Gratitude and Spiritual Gratitude

Abstract

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.

The roles of anthropomorphism, spirituality, and gratitude in pro-environmental attitudes

“…People may be grateful to God for nature. This way of experiencing gratitude has been observed in other domains of people's lives, in which people are grateful for God's blessings in their life (e.g., Aghababaei & Tabik, 2013;Emmons & Kneezel, 2005;Krause, 2006;Krause & Hayward, 2015Nelson et al, 2022;Rosmarin et al, 2011;C. White et al, 2023;Wilt & Exline, 2022).…”

Gratitude reduces the adverse impact of salient male privilege on men’s well-being.

“…Tsang, 2006); in contrast, (2), (5), and (6) were "privilege/no gratitude" conditions (cf. White et al, 2022). Finally, (1) was the neutral baseline, lacking either a benefit or a privilege salience reflection task.…”

“…Underscoring gratitude's interpersonal nature, Yu et al (2017) documented a distinct response pattern in the brain's reward centers when participants believed that others voluntarily chose to offload participants' exposure to painful stimuli onto themselves versus when a computer "chose" comparable pain reduction. Moreover, White et al (2022) showed that gratitude maps onto attributing causality for positive outcomes to an external, personal source (vs. circumstances or oneself). Preemptively inducing gratitude may therefore mitigate the aversive consequences of salient gender-based privilege among men.…”