Giving Thanks is Associated with Lower PTSD Severity: A Meta-Analytic Review
- PDF / 742,322 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 36 Downloads / 172 Views
Giving Thanks is Associated with Lower PTSD Severity: A Meta‑Analytic Review Angela L. Richardson1 · Matthew W. Gallagher1 Accepted: 5 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract A rising interest in the psychological community in resilience has spurred research examining psychological resources that promote resilience to psychopathologies such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One such psychological resource is gratitude, or one’s perception of a positive outcome resulting from an outside entity. The present study is a meta-analytic review of the relationship between gratitude and PTSD in order to determine whether the current literature is consistent with gratitude acting as a possible protective factor against PTSD severity as well as a possible intervention mechanism. A comprehensive literature review identified 11 studies that met eligibility criteria, resulting in a total of 3694 participants. The mean effect size between gratitude and PTSD severity was − 0.23 [95% CI (− 0.32, − 0.15)], indicating a moderate, negative relationship between gratitude and PTSD severity. Moderator analyses indicated that these results were not impacted by gender or trauma type. The moderate association between gratitude and PTSD is indicative that further study may be needed to explore if and how gratitude may work to protect against or be used to reduce PTSD. Keywords Gratitude · Posttraumatic stress disorder · Meta-analysis · Resilience
1 A Meta‑Analytic Review of Gratitude and PTSD 1.1 Gratitude Gratitude is a universal trait found throughout the world’s cultures and major religions (Carman and Streng 1989). Gratitude is the perception of a positive outcome as a result of an outside force. One can feel gratitude towards another individual, or a non-human source (i.e. God, nature; Teigen 1997). While it can be an emotion, gratitude has typically been conceptualized as a disposition or trait since its emergence in contemporary psychological research (McCullough et al. 2002). Dispositional gratitude generally has four dimensions: intensity (how much gratitude one feels), frequency (how often one feels gratitude), span * Angela L. Richardson [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Houston, 3695 Cullen, Boulevard Room 126, Houston, TX 77204‑5022, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
A. L. Richardson, M. W. Gallagher
(the number of circumstances for which one feels grateful), and density (how many people to whom one is grateful for one outcome; McCullough et al. 2002). A large component of gratitude is attributional style, in that the highly grateful individual may attribute a positive outcome to contributions from an external source more so than their less grateful counterpart (Weiner 1986). While it is related to other positive traits such as happiness, optimism and hope, research supports the premise that gratitude is a distinct trait (Ellsworth and Smith 1988; Schimmack and Reisenzein 1997). The life orientation view of gratitude, in which gratitude is a higher order factor, p
Data Loading...
