A lot of so-called “positive psychology” can seem a bit flaky,
especially if you’re the sort of person disinclined to respond well to
an admonition to “look on the bright side.” But positive psychologists
have published some interesting findings, and one of the more robust
ones is that feeling grateful is very good for you. Time and again,
studies have shown that performing simple gratitude exercises, like
keeping a gratitude diary or writing letters of thanks, can bring a
range of benefits, such as feelings of increased well-being and reduced depression, that often linger well after the exercises are finished.
Now a brain-scanning study in NeuroImage brings us a little closer to understanding why
these exercises have these effects. The results suggest that even
months after a simple, short gratitude writing task, people’s brains are
still wired to feel extra thankful. The implication is that gratitude
tasks work, at least in part, because they have a self-perpetuating
nature: The more you practice gratitude, the more attuned you are to it
and the more you can enjoy its psychological benefits.
The Indiana University researchers, led by Prathik Kini, recruited 43
people who were undertaking counseling sessions as a treatment for
their anxiety or depression. Twenty-two of them were assigned to a
gratitude intervention; for the first three sessions of their weekly
counseling, this group spent 20 minutes writing a letter in which they
expressed their gratitude to the recipient, an hour in total (whether
they chose to send these letters was up to them). The other participants
acted as a control group, so they simply attended their counseling as
usual without performing the gratitude task.
Three months after their counseling was over, all of the participants
completed a “Pay It Forward” gratitude task in a brain scanner. Each
was “given” various amounts of money by imaginary benefactors whose
names and photos appeared onscreen to add to the realism of the task.
The researchers told the participants that each benefactor said that if
the participant wanted to express their gratitude for the monetary gift,
they’d appreciate it if the participant gave some or all of the
donation to a named third party (again, identified by photo and name),
or a named charity. The participants knew this was all an exercise, but
were all told that one of the transactions, chosen later at random,
would actually occur — that is, they’d actually receive the cash amount
offered to them by one of the benefactors minus the amount they chose to
pass on (and the money they opted to pass on really would go to
charity).
The researchers found that, on average, the more money a participant
gave away, and the stronger the feelings of gratitude they reported
feeling, the more activity they exhibited in a range of brain areas in
the frontal, parietal, and occipital regions. Interestingly, these
neural-activity patterns appeared somewhat distinct from those that
usually appear when brain-scan subjects complete tasks associated with
emotions like empathy or thinking about other people’s points of view,
which is consistent with the idea that gratitude is a unique emotion.
Most exciting, though, is the finding that the participants who’d
completed the gratitude task months earlier not only reported feeling
more gratefulness two weeks after the task than members of the control
group, but also, months later, showed more gratitude-related brain
activity in the scanner. The researchers described these “profound” and
“long-lasting” neural effects as “particularly noteworthy,” and they
highlighted that one of the main regions that showed this increased
sensitivity — the “pregenual anterior cingulate,” which is known to be
involved in predicting the effects of one’s own actions on other people —
overlaps with a key brain region identified in the only previous study on the neurological footprint of gratitude.
This result suggests that the more practice you give your brain at
feeling and expressing gratitude, the more it adapts to this mind-set —
you could even think of your brain as having a sort of gratitude
“muscle” that can be exercised and strengthened (not so different from
various other qualities that can be cultivated through practice, of
course). If this is right, the more of an effort you make to feel
gratitude one day, the more the feeling will come to you spontaneously
in the future. It also potentially helps explain another established
finding, that gratitude can spiral: The more thankful we feel, the more likely we are to act pro-socially toward others, causingthem to feel grateful and setting up a beautiful virtuous cascade.
However, let’s not allow the warm glow of all this gratitude to melt
our critical faculties. It’s important to realize this result is
incredibly preliminary. For one thing, as the researchers openly
acknowledge, they didn’t conduct a baseline brain scan of the
participants before they started the Pay It Forward game, so it’s
possible, though unlikely given that participants were randomly assigned
to the gratitude and control groups, that the participants who
performed the gratitude task simply had more neural sensitivity to
gratitude already, not because they performed the gratitude task.
Another thing: Members of the control group didn’t perform a comparison
writing task, so we can’t know for sure that it was the act of writing a
letter of thanks, as opposed to any kind of writing exercise, that led to increased neural sensitivity to gratitude.
Still, neurological investigations into gratitude are in their early
days, and this research certainly gives us some intriguing clues as to
how and why gratitude exercises are beneficial. For that we can be,
well, grateful.
Source : health.com