The Grateful Alive

Emotional experience is shared across cultures with some variety in proprieties of expression and the value placed on the emotion. If someone ever asked me to summarize emotion research in one sentence during my last moments, this would be it. Gratitude is one emotion I got to analyze closely for a good ten years as an undergraduate and graduate student. For this reason, people like me feel illuminated at 3am after realizing why gratitude not being as facially differentiated is a good thing. Gratitude expression and behaviors should vary more adaptively in cultural experiences and as individualized choices over time (see Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006; Oguni & Ishii, 2024; Stellar et al., 2017).

Gratitude is a sense of thankfulness after acknowledging the receipt of benefits from an external moral agent (McCullough et al., 2001). Gratitude as an appreciative state of mind enables consciously reframing of life experiences to minimize the corrosive effects of life. When I was twenty, one of my first research tasks involved coding through 423 gratitude narratives (i.e., translation of interview/word-based survey information into categories and numbers to discover scientifically meaningful patterns). This work involved taking each gratitude account and identifying the benefactor, beneficiary, the gift, nature of the gift, and many other categories, while deliberating through the challenge of linguistic expression. I had to seriously think whether 'gratitude for parents' should make the parents an object or savior. Because of this early training followed by similar analyses for my own project later, the way I saw paragraphs changed forever. What I gained from this work though is a critical understanding of how emotions may be valued and experienced differently across cultures.

Gratitude experiences may shine and get highlighted quite differently depending on cultural mindsets. For example, gratitude may act only as a way of recognition and realization of what one has gained in a more Westernized mindset in which autonomy and individuality are more important. In a more collectivistic Eastern mindset, in which group values matter more, gratitude can be a path for maintaining harmony. In this scenario, focusing on the success of interpersonally shared social experiences matters more, not only the individual attainment of finding a better fortunate new self. The difference is of going beyond asking how you have been fortunate or benefitted to whether you have generated a fortunate social exchange altogether — a step ahead from reciprocity to collective or interpersonal success. This doesn't mean one cultural implementation of gratitude is better than the other. Gratitude may have culturally evolved with different purposes.

An ecocultural perspective is also often helpful to explain why cultural goals of emotions vary according to which having cultural origins in a hunting-gathering versus agriculture society may make interdependent success more salient to the latter (Uskul & colleagues, 2021). Naikan therapy, a Japanese self-reflection technique, originally credited to a Buddhist monk Yoshimoto Ishin (1916 -1988) (Reynolds, 1977), illustrates this more socially conscious application of gratitude well. Three main questions are asked in a Naikan journal:

1. What have I received from ____?

2. What have I given to ____?

3. What troubles and difficulties have I caused ____?

The third question, as you may expect, shouldn't be as intuitively therapeutic for social enhancers, i.e. cultures in which the self is typically established by filling the regularly depleted and threatened 'self' pot of gold. In China and Japan, for example, continuously chiseling a better self out of one block of stone is more common, metaphorically speaking. Therefore, for a culturally incongruent group, the focus will have to be directed to actions, not the person. The questions, with the same therapeutic value and effect, can then become

1. The benefits I have received from another person(s) are ...

2. The benefits I have enabled for another person(s) are ...

3. The actions I have engaged in to facilitate troubles and difficulties for another person(s) are ... (Possibly followed by a fourth question to reconcile a good sense of self as

   'The actions I have taken (or will take) to minimize the poor effects of the part of the harm caused by me are...')

Emotions aren't plainly good or bad for us. Gratitude as a morally engaging and dynamic emotion can have many benefits if linguistically applied in culturally congruent ways. One American President knew this well, which is why I'll end with this gratitude-minded quote.

"Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country."

— John F. Kennedy

(Spoken during the inaugural address on January 20th, 1961)

References

Bartlett, M. Y., & DeSteno, D. (2006). Gratitude and prosocial behavior: helping when it costs you. Psychological science, 17(4), 319–325.

McCullough, M. E., Kilpatrick, S. D., Emmons, R. A., & Larson, D. B. (2001). Is gratitude a moral affect? Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 249–266.

Oguni, R., & Ishii, C. (2024). Gratitude promotes prosocial behavior even in uncertain situation. Scientific reports, 14(1), 14379.

Reynolds D. K. (1977). Naikan Therapy—an experiential view. International Journal of Social Psychiatry. 23(4), 252-263.

Stellar, J. E., Gordon, A. M., Piff, P. K., Cordaro, D., Anderson, C. L., Bai, Y., Maruskin, L. A., & Keltner, D. (2017). Self-transcendent emotions and their social functions: Compassion, gratitude, and awe bind us to others through prosociality. Emotion Review, 9(3), 200–207.

Uskul, A. K., Kitayama, S., & Nisbett, R. E. (2008). Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(25), 8552-8556.

Note. The title is inspired from the Grateful Dead.