November 26, 2011

A recent study has shown that college students who were asked to write letters of gratitude were less aggressive when provoked. The study was published in the September 2011 issue of Social Psychology and Personality Science.

"We know that grateful people are nice people," said study author Professor Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky (UK) College of Arts & Sciences in an article by UK. "But this is the first study to really show that they're not very aggressive either."

The study tested 168 students who were asked to write a brief letter to someone to whom they were close that would then be collected and reviewed by a same-gender partner. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to write about five things for which they were most grateful, while the other half wrote about five things they liked to do.

The papers were then taken from the room by the experimenter and later returned with either positive feedback such as, “Excellent essay! No comments!” or insulting and provoking comments such as, “This is one of the worst essays I’ve ever read.”

After receiving the evaluated papers, the aggression test began. The students were then told they would be competing against their reviewer to see who could respond more quickly, with the winner sending a burst of white noise to the loser. The intensity and duration of the first burst of white noise was then measured, standardized and added to create an aggression level.

The researchers also hired two independent reviewers who rated the written letters for both gratitude and positive emotion expressed by the author. Between the two essay groups, no difference was found on the positive emotion scale, however, and not surprisingly, the gratitude letters scored the highest for gratitude.

The research indicated that those students who were provoked by criticism scored the highest on aggression, except for those who scored high on gratitude who behaved less aggressively.

"If you count your blessings, you're more likely to empathize with other people," said DeWall in the UK article, "More empathic people are less aggressive."

Source: The University of Kentucky

Dave Gorczynski is president of SPARK, a non-profit organization that has provided free energy work sessions and workshops across New York City since 2002. He writes a regular column about energy work and meditation for the Compact News in New York City's Chinatown. E-mail him at dave@sparkenergy.org.