Gratitude as a Virtue: Assessing Age-related Changes via Three Replications in Southern Brazil

• In Event: 1-036 - Gratitude in youth and adults in the United States, Brazil, and Poland

Integrative Statement

The three most widely used measures to assess gratitude—the Gratitude Questionnaire-6 (GQ-6: McCullough et al., 2002), the Gratitude, Resentment, Appreciation Test (GRAT: Watkins et al., 2003), and the Gratitude Adjective Checklist (GAC: McCullough et al., 2002)—treat the concept as though it is a generalized disposition to react with positive emotion on experiencing a wide range of occurrences. As such, respondents scoring high or low on these measures are viewed as being more or less grateful. Although these measures have good psychometric properties (Froh, et al., 2010) it is unclear whether they actually measure gratitude as a character trait. People could consistently feel a positive emotion when receiving benefits from benefactors but never reciprocate when having suitable opportunities—ingratitude rather than gratitude. Moreover, very few of the items in these measures refer to humans as the source of the positive emotion, and none of them to specific benefactors. They thus seem to assess appreciation rather than gratitude (Adler, 2016).

By contrast, one measure (Baumgarten-Tramer, 1938), expanded and used in a variety of societies as the Wishes and Gratitude Survey (WAGS: Freitas et al., 2008) asks respondents to consider their greatest wish before asking them what they would do for their benefactor. Rather than assessing degree of gratitude this measure assesses the types of gratitude that participants express (verbal, concrete, and connective). The most sophisticated type, connective gratitude, requires that beneficiaries say that they would reciprocate with something that their benefactors would like or need. This type of response, rather than expressing either verbal or concrete gratitude, seems to be both gratitude and a virtue of character (as La Taille, 2018 and Williams, 2002, have pointed out, aspects of one’s character are not the only things that can be viewed as virtues).

Assessing psychometric properties of open-ended responses is difficult. We have therefore evaluated the measure’s reliability by replication. Three separate studies were conducted by different researchers using the WAGS with 7- to 14-year-olds in the same Brazilian city in 2008 (N=430, M=10.4 years, SD=2.09, 57.9% female), 2012 (N=388, M=10.6 years, SD=2.09, 58.2% female), and 2017 (N=283, M=10.9 years, SD=2.15, 53.7% female).

Logistic regression revealed consistent findings across the three studies in terms of changes with each additional year. There was a significant increase in verbal gratitude (B=.189, eB=1.21, p<.001 for Sample 1, B=.282, eB=1.33, p<.001 for Sample 2, and B=.170, eB=1.18, p=.005 for Sample 3) and a significant decrease in concrete gratitude (B=-.396, eB=.673, p<.001 in Sample 1, B=-.201, eB=.818, p<.001 in Sample 2, and B=-.230, eB=.795, p=.001 in Sample 3). The one discrepant finding related to the expression of connective gratitude, for in two of the samples there was no change with age, but in one age was related to an increase. This measure thus has promise as a means to assess gratitude as a virtue of character.

Authors

• Lia Beatriz de Lucca Freitas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elisa Avilar Merçon-Vargas, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo
  Non-Presenting Author

• Fernanda Palhares, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jonathan Tudge, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Presenting Author