Gratitude and the Good Life by Philip C. Watkins

Author:Philip C. Watkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

More important for our discussion are the memory accessibility results that are illustrated in Fig. 7.3. As in our previous study, we used our unstructured life events recall measure and asked our subjects to recall significant or salient life events for two time frames: the past week and the past month excluding the past week. As before, after the recall trials subjects went back to their written recollections and rated them for valence and other variables. Different from previous studies however, in this study we demarcated each minute of recall. This was because we felt that the memories that were recalled during the first minute would be most indicative of the accessibility of positive memories. As expected, no significant treatment effects were found with the accessibility of negative memories (perhaps due to a floor effect), but the gratitude treatment did produce significantly more positive memories during the first minute of recall than the other treatments. Note from Fig. 7.3 that this advantage was particularly evident at post-treatment. This probably supports the idea—as emphasized above—that the primary reason that gratitude promotes positive recall is because it benefits the encoding of positive events. Also, I should note that we did not find any significant memory effects for memories from the past month, only memories from the past week. Again, this seems to support more of an encoding benefit hypothesis, rather than a retrieval bias interpretation. In a nutshell, in this study we found that grateful processing of blessings showed a significant impact on subjective well-being, and at least in part, this appears to be due to increasing the accessibility of positive memories.

Fig. 7.3Impact of gratitude three blessings treatment on accessibility of positive memories

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