Grateful to help you or grateful to help me? An investigation of the effects of expressing gratitude to benefit oneself

Introduction: Gratitude interventions are often promoted as self-help exercises. However, previous evidence has suggested that expressing gratitude with the intention of feeling better may paradoxically undermine well-being when compared to expressing gratitude without any expectation of personal benefit. Method: Across two studies (N = 475), participants were randomly assigned to compose and deliver a gratitude letter using three rationales: self-focused (emphasizing benefits to the self), other-focused (emphasizing benefits to the recipient), and neutral (no rationale). Results: The neutral group reported lower well-being than the two experimental groups (self-focused and other-focused) on a variety of outcomes, whereas the experimental groups did not differ on well-being measures. However, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count text analyses revealed that participants in the self-focused and other-focused conditions composed their letters differently. Participants in the self-focused condition tended to write letters that were more self-referential, longer, less positive, and contained more insight/cognitive processing language focused on their own mental states, whereas participants in the other-focused condition tended to write letters that made more direct references to the recipient, were shorter, and more positive. Mediation analyses suggested that using more positive emotion words paradoxically predicted greater negative affect. Discussion: Our results indicate that inclusion of a rationale enhances the effectiveness of a gratitude intervention, and that the emphasis of the rationale can alter the composition of gratitude letters in ways that may be meaningful for recipients of gratitude. Implications for future research are discussed in light of these findings.