Using a Gratitude Intervention to Enhance Well-Being in Older Adults

Abstract

The increasingly ageing population includes a proportion of well older adults that may benefit from low-level psychological support to help maintain their wellbeing. A factor consistently regarded as integral to wellbeing is gratitude. The effect of a 'Three good things in life' gratitude intervention on hedonic and eudemonic wellbeing and perceived stress levels in non-clinically depressed older adults was examined. This intervention has not been evaluated with older adults previously. The duration of the intervention was two weeks and baseline, end of intervention and 30 -day follow up measures were compared. The effects of online and paper delivery of the intervention were compared and differences in acceptability of the two routes examined. The daily positive events identified by participants were also analysed. Participants were 88 healthy community living adults aged 60 years or over.The intervention produced significant differences in eudemonic wellbeing as measured by flourishing from baseline to day15 that was maintained as the day 45. Significant increases in flourishing were evident from baseline to day 45. There were decreases in perceived stress from day to day 15 but these were not maintained once the intervention ended. There were no significant differences between online or paper delivery of the intervention. This age group managed and many preferred online delivery, Gratitude diaries seem to be a cost-effective method of producing beneficial improvements in wellbeing for older adults.

Stress among UK academics: identifying who copes best

“…Problem-focussed coping skills can be developed via training courses. Gratitude, hope, and self-efficacy are character strengths that can also be developed using positive psychology interventions (Emmons & McCullough, 2003;Killen & Macaskill, 2014). This then provides new approaches to stress management training to augment the more traditional approaches.…”

The Impact of Positive Psychological Interventions on Well-Being in Healthy Elderly People

“…Since the publication of Seligman and Csikszentmihaly's article, the number of PPIs studies has increased rapidly worldwide, it appears that PPIs are effective in enhancing wellbeing. Many of these studies demonstrated the efficacy of PPIs on well-being such as gratitude (Killen and Macaskill 2014), forgiveness (Reed and Enright 2006), life review therapy (Preschl et al 2012), positive reminiscence (Meléndez Moral et al 2014) and self-management (Frieswijk et al 2006). There are four factors that appear to enhance the effectiveness of PPIs:…”

“…Four studies included follow-up measures with the varied time scales, two completing the follow up after 1 month (Killen and Macaskill 2014;Chiang et al 2008), one at 3 months (Preschl et al 2012), and one at 6 months (Frieswijk et al 2006). Due to the variations in the well-being measures utilized, the study designs (including only four RCTs), intervention content and behaviours targeted, it was not possible to conduct a thorough meta-analysis on the data.…”

An Online Gratitude Intervention for Young Adults with Advanced Cancer

“…A 2012 study found that writing letters of gratitude, instead of keeping a journal or diary, increased happiness and life satisfaction and decreased depressive symptoms in the experimental group when compared to the control group (Toepfer, Cichy, & Peters, 2012). Another recent study found that an online gratitude intervention increased eudemonic well-being (feeling like life is meaningful, rather than simply pleasurable (Hui, Glitza, Chisholm, Yennu, & Bruera, 2013)) and decreased stress in a sample of 88 healthy, communitydwelling older adults when compared to controls, and no difference was found between the electronic gratitude journal and a paper version (Killen & Macaskill, 2014).…”

“…The prompt will focus on the experience of the emotion rather than the length or completeness of the writing itself. These instructions are consistent with other gratitude interventions that have been successfully studied (Emmons, 2010;Emmons & McCullough, 2003a;Kerr et al, 2014;Killen & Macaskill, 2014;Ruini & Vescovelli, 2013). The full prompt is included in Appendix C.…”