Writing about gratitude increases emotion-regulation efficacy

Gratitude has gained attention in the domain of positive emotion research given its important prosocial role in connecting us to others and fostering well-being. It remains less clear which mechanisms gratitude acts to promote benefits in people’s life. We considered emotional regulation as one of these main processes. Ninety participants were randomly assigned to one of the three groups: write and share gratitude stories, write gratitude stories, and write and share non-emotional routine situations. Participants were asked to write twice per week during four consecutive weeks after which they returned to the laboratory to perform an emotion reappraisal task. The groups that wrote about gratitude were more effective in applying emotion reappraisal than the control group, i.e. both demonstrated better down-regulation of negative images than the control group. The results of the current study demonstrate a positive effect of focusing on personal past experiences of gratitude on present emotion regulation.