The Grateful Personality
This chapter presents some of the current models of personality development with the goal of framing the relationship between gratitude and other dimensions of personality. Features of the prosocial personality incorporate many features of gratitude. Indi
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The Grateful Personality
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance. Eckhart Tolle
Is there such a thing as a grateful personality? Are some people more predisposed to respond with gratitude than others? Is it possible to enhance the ability to have grateful responses? Or is the disposition to experience gratitude an inborn trait that cannot be altered? These are important questions that will be addressed in this chapter as the story of gratitude takes us to the heart of the human personality. The story of gratitude has been narrated thus far through using specific instances to highlight the structures and conditions that facilitate the emotion experience. The altruistic intentions of a gift-giver and the value of a gift are the underlying factors that facilitate feelings of gratefulness and appreciation. These situational factors help us to understand the nature of gratitude and how it operates within the arena of human relationships. In this chapter, the narrative of gratitude’s story shifts from the experience of gratitude as a discrete event, a momentary blip on the screen, to gratitude as an orientation to life, and as a way of being in the world. Another way of phrasing this is to say that there is an important distinction between gratitude as a state and gratitude as a trait. Think of the emotion experience of gratitude as on a continuum. On one end would be a momentary feeling of gratefulness, a temporary state of awareness that happens infrequently or on occasion. On the other end of the continuum would be the trait or disposition to experience feel© The Author(s) 2016 J. Elfers, P. Hlava, The Spectrum of Gratitude Experience, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41030-2_8
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ings of gratitude on a frequent basis, as if someone’s nervous system was primed to view the world through a lens of gratitude. Before describing the features that contribute to a grateful disposition, and the factors and conditions that contribute to a grateful personality, a brief detour into the architecture of personality will be helpful to set the stage for the next act in the story of gratitude.
PERSONALITY The term personality is a nominalization. A nominalization is a linguistic device that takes a process and transforms it into a noun or a thing. An example would be to take the verb investigate and nominalize it as an investigation. While framing personality as a noun may be useful for everyday speech, from a conceptual perspective, it is better to avoid thinking of personality as something that someone possesses. Personality is more accurately conceptualized as a dynamic, integrated system of tendencies, traits, and dispositions that sometimes work together harmoniously, but sometimes conflict and seem to work at cross-purposes. If you think of a close friend that you know well, you could likely predict how that person would act in a variety of situations, and that predictability is what makes for strong bonds of friendship. The tendencies and dispositio
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