Becoming happier takes both a will and a proper way: An experimental longitudinal intervention to boost well-being.

An 8-month-long experimental study examined the immediate and longer term effects of regularly practicing two assigned positive activities (expressing optimism and gratitude) on well-being. More important, this intervention allowed us to explore the impact of two metafactors that are likely to influence the success of any positive activity: whether one self-selects into the study knowing that it is about increasing happiness and whether one invests effort into the activity over time. Our results indicate that initial self-selection makes a difference, but only in the two positive activity conditions, not the control, and that continued effort also makes a difference, but, again, only in the treatment conditions. We conclude that happiness interventions are more than just placebos, but that they are most successful when participants know about, endorse, and commit to the intervention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

I won’t let you down… or will I? Core self-evaluations, other-orientation, anticipated guilt and gratitude, and job performance.

Although core self-evaluations have been linked to higher job performance, research has shown variability in the strength of this relationship. We propose that high core self-evaluations are more likely to increase job performance for other-oriented employees, who tend to anticipate feelings of guilt and gratitude. We tested these hypotheses across 3 field studies using different operationalizations of both performance and other-orientation (prosocial motivation, agreeableness, and duty). In Study 1, prosocial motivation strengthened the association between core self-evaluations and the performance of professional university fundraisers. In Study 2, agreeableness strengthened the association between core self-evaluations and supervisor ratings of initiative among public service employees. In Study 3, duty strengthened the association between core self-evaluations and the objective productivity of call center employees, and this moderating relationship was mediated by feelings of anticipated guilt and gratitude. We discuss implications for theory and research on personality and job performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

关于高校贫困生感恩缺失的思考

高校贫困生感恩缺失的现状总体上是:一部分贫困生不知感恩,感恩缺失严重;一部分贫困生不愿感恩,感恩教育有待加强;大部分贫困生知恩,但不会感恩,感恩缺位。感恩缺失是一种特殊的心理危机,也是一种异常的心理现象。文章着重从心理健康角度来分析贫困生感恩缺失的原因,并试图通过社会、学校、个人等各方面的努力搭建沟通感恩的平台,营造和谐宽容的感恩氛围,促使贫困生将感恩外化,形成良好的感恩体系,为构建社会主义和谐社会贡献一份力量。     

情感教育在高职学生思政教育中的实践——以浙江水利水电专科学校大学生感恩教育实践活动为例

以情感人,以情动人,把情感教育融入到大学生的思政教育之中,必将收到良好的效果.通过感恩教育,这种以情动情的情感教育,可让大学生懂得感恩,学会感恩,使他们以一种健康的心态、健全的人格面对人生.几年来,浙江水利水电专科学校电气系,坚持以感恩教育为基本抓手,开展学生的日常思想政治教育,坚持从学生的实际生活出发,以情感人,情理交融,感人心灵,让学生在不知不觉中受到影响、感染和教育.     

高职大学生感恩意识研究

感恩是中华民族的传统美德,感恩教育对建设和谐校园、和谐社会起着重要的作用。本文通过对大学生感恩意识缺失的现状、原因进行分析,提出加强大学生感恩教育、增强大学生感恩意识的相关对策。     

A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior.

Although research has established that receiving expressions of gratitude increases prosocial behavior, little is known about the psychological mechanisms that mediate this effect. We propose that gratitude expressions can enhance prosocial behavior through both agentic and communal mechanisms, such that when helpers are thanked for their efforts, they experience stronger feelings of self-efficacy and social worth, which motivate them to engage in prosocial behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2, receiving a brief written expression of gratitude motivated helpers to assist both the beneficiary who expressed gratitude and a different beneficiary. These effects of gratitude expressions were mediated by perceptions of social worth and not by self-efficacy or affect. In Experiment 3, we constructively replicated these effects in a field experiment: A manager's gratitude expression increased the number of calls made by university fundraisers, which was mediated by social worth but not self-efficacy. In Experiment 4, a different measure of social worth mediated the effects of an interpersonal gratitude expression. Our results support the communal perspective rather than the agentic perspective: Gratitude expressions increase prosocial behavior by enabling individuals to feel socially valued. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

It's a wonderful life: Mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts.

The authors hypothesized that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one's life would improve affective states more than thinking about the presence of a positive event but that people would not predict this when making affective forecasts. In Studies 1 and 2, college students wrote about the ways in which a positive event might never have happened and was surprising or how it became part of their life and was unsurprising. As predicted, people in the former condition reported more positive affective states. In Study 3, college student forecasters failed to anticipate this effect. In Study 4, Internet respondents and university staff members who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on gratitude induction and counterfactual reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

论当今大学生感恩教育的缺失与重建

部分大学生遇见老师时连一句“老师您好”都难说出口，这一现象折射出部分大学生感恩教育的缺失。高校是培养大学生的神圣殿堂，务必加强感恩教育的理论创新与实践创新，担负起历史使命，把大学生培养成为合格的社会主义和谐社会的建设者。     

Gratitude as moral sentiment: Emotion-guided cooperation in economic exchange.

Economic exchange often pits options for selfish and cooperative benefit against one another. Decisions favoring communal profit at the expense of self-interest have traditionally been thought to stem from strategic control aimed at tamping down emotional responses centered on immediate resource acquisition. In the present article, evidence is provided to argue against this limited view of the role played by emotion in shaping prosociality. Findings demonstrate that the social emotion gratitude functions to engender cooperative economic exchange even at the expense of greater individual financial gains. Using real-time inductions, increased gratitude is shown to directly mediate increased monetary giving within the context of an economic game, even where such giving increases communal profit at the expense of individual gains. Moreover, increased giving occurred regardless of whether the beneficiary was a known individual or complete stranger, thereby removing the possibility that it stemmed from simple awareness of reciprocity constraints. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gratitude in Intermediate Affective Terrain: Links of Grateful Moods to Individual Differences and Daily Emotional Experience.

Two studies were conducted to explore gratitude in daily mood and the relationships among various affective manifestations of gratitude. In Study 1, spiritual transcendence and a variety of positive affective traits were related to higher mean levels of gratitude across 21 days. Study 2 replicated these findings and revealed that on days when people had more grateful moods than was typical for them, they also reported more frequent daily episodes of grateful emotions, more intense gratitude per episode, and more people to whom they were grateful than was typical for them. In addition, gratitude as an affective trait appeared to render participants' grateful moods somewhat resistant to the effects of discrete emotional episodes of gratitude. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)