Be Grateful to Be Happy

by Serena Kwok, Kelly Lee, Hyunjy Lucy Kim

The Problem

Keeping busy is the new norm in our modern fast-paced society. With rapid technological and scientific developments, we are always busy taking in the spread of incessant information that is out there. Yet, much research suggests modern environment may be conducive to epidemic depression (Hidaka, 2012). There are features of modernity that are seemingly causing psychologically disturbing effects to humans.

Firstly, young adults always see information that pressurises them to meet unrealistic expectations that society sets for them, which are often delusional and at an unachievable standard. Through social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, they are constantly overwhelmed by massive amounts of often false and unrealistic images that suggest how they should look and behave, and things they need in order to have a happy and successful life. Unhealthy comparison among images uploaded by their peers and celebrities and themselves is likely to negatively affect their self-esteem and confidence. If they feel that their lives do not meet these portrayed images, they might eventually develop mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. In fact, many studies found that greater use of the internet was associated with negative psychological health (Kraut et al., 2002; O’Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011; Rosen, Cheever & Carrier, 2012).

In addition, modern lifestyles also contribute to the incidence of depression. Modern populations are increasingly overfed, leading to an increased rate of obesity, lack of physical activities, sleep-deprived, and socially isolated. The evolutionary mismatch between past human environments and rapidly changing modernized society is predicted to be the central cause for increasing prevalence of mental health problems (Hidaka, 2012).

The Importance of this Problem

This problem is important to address because the percentage of young adults experiencing mental health has been steadfastly and constantly increasing in recent decades, with the rate of 63% increase from 2009 to 2017 (American Psychological Association, 2019), and the prevalence of mental disorders has adverse effects on society as a whole, harming general public health and increasing suicide mortality rate (Bradvik, 2018).

One of the effective methods to deal with this issue could be gratitude. It is so easy for us to get caught up in all the negativity in the world. If everyone could take a step back from their busy lives and contemplate about gratefulness, focusing on what is good in lives and what they are thankful for, their emotional functioning would improve. In fact, many research that examined the effect of feeling gratitude found an increased rate of wellbeing and happiness in adults as well as in children (Kausar & Rubina, 2018; Nguyen & Gordon, 2019; Watkins, Woodward, Stone & Kolts, 2003; Emmons & McCullough, 2003; Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006). Based on these findings, we are going to examine whether feeling grateful increases happiness and wellbeing. We hope that this would help buffer the negative effects of mental issues associated with today’s modernised world.

Our Target Audiences

Our intervention is aimed at University students, aged between 18 to 30. Notably, a study has suggested that about 50% of mental health issues are established before the age of 14, and 75% by the age of 24 (Catania et al., 2011). From this finding, mental health seems to be a serious concern mainly for the age of university students, and we would like to take this opportunity to reduce the rate of mental health issues by promoting gratitude and happiness. Also, Krosnick and Alwin (1989) suggested that young adults, who are aged below 25 are more susceptible to persuasion and behaviour changes. Hence, we recruited 25 participants in total, in which 21 of them (84%) aged between 18 to 23, 2 of them (8%) aged between 24-30, and 2 of them (8%) aged above 30. There were 17 (68%) females and 8 (32%) males in total. 

Our target audiences are frequent internet users and therefore we have designed a poster and published it on social media, including Facebook and Instagram. Also, we stuck the poster around the campus so that students walking past could stop and take a glance. 

In order to attract students’ attention, we have designed the poster with catchy phrases and colourful background that are simple to read. This helps to increase their motivation to learn about gratitude and be more willing to participate in this activity of gratitude-diary-writing.

The Intervention

We hypothesise:

1. Writing in a gratitude diary daily for 2 weeks would increase people’s general level of happiness

Procedure for intervention:

• We recruited 25 participants at random on campus, and they were asked to fill in an online questionnaire where their demographic information and their initial rating of general happiness were recorded 
• They were then given a template of a gratitude diary, and were asked to write down 3 things that they are grateful for per day for a 2-week period.

The diary templates were as follow:  

 

The following is the poster we used to highlight the importance of gratitude to our wellbeing:

Design:

We used a repeated measure T-test through SPSS to analyse participants’ general rate of happiness from before the 2 weeks and end of the 2 weeks.

• Dependent variable: Rate of happiness (Scale of 1-10)
• Independent variable: Before and After the 2 weeks

Results:

Out of the 25 participants, 21 of them completed the diary every day for 2 weeks. 4 participants did not complete fully. 21 of them claim that they would continue this habit of gratitude diary even after this experiment. 

There was a significant difference in the rating for general happiness for before the experiment (M=7.04, SD=1.43) and after the experiment (M=8.52, SD=1.64); t(24)= -5.12, p < 0.01.

Fig.1 The Happiness Rating of participants before and after the 2-week period

The results suggest that keeping a gratitude diary does improve participants' level of general happiness. Specifically, our results suggest that writing 3 things you are grateful for every day for 2 weeks would make a person happier.

Some participants also gave feedback about their diary-writing experiences:

  

Psychological and Persuasion Techniques used in our project

 1.       Elaboration Likelihood Model

ELM is a dual-processing theory describing a change of attitudes. There are two routes to persuasion: the Central Route and the Peripheral Route (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). 

• The Central Route: is used when the target audiences are interested and would care for the message. Audiences would have a higher level of elaboration. The central route involves providing statistical figures and expert judgements.
• The Peripheral Route: is used when target audiences are not as interested in the message. Audiences would have a lower level of elaboration. The peripheral route involves influencing audiences through other cues other than the strength of the message itself. It involves examples like the use of framing effect, short and snappy statements, source credibility and visual presentation.

A day-to-day-life example that applies the ELM model:

Tom is an athlete and he is planning to buy a new pair of sports shoes for his upcoming competition. While watching tv, he sees a commercial and it claims that the pair of shoes can provide extra comfort and protective cushioning that can prevent ankle twisting. The commercial also provided statistical findings that support the claim of the product. Tom decided to get that pair of shoes as he believes that he will be able to perform better. In this example, the central route to persuasion has been used by Tom as he is persuaded to buy the product based on the facts and content of the message. Alternatively, if he saw a commercial with his favourite athlete promoting the product and decided to buy it, the peripheral route of persuasion has been used as he is persuaded by other cues instead of the content of the message. 

For our current project, we stuck our poster around campus and also posted it on our Instagram accounts. We wanted to make use of the Peripheral Route to persuasion to hopefully influence people to write down things they are grateful for every day. We made a very colourful and visually attractive poster, with important information like the benefits of being grateful popping out with the highlighted background. We made sure that all the information in the poster was framed positively so that people are more likely to be convinced (Guo, Trueblood and Diederich, 2017). We also included research studies done by experts in the field. As people will typically only walk by these posters or only have a quick scroll through social media, it is useful to use this technique to bring our message across to people. 

2.              Yale Attitude Change Approach

The Yale Attitude Change Approach describes the situations and conditions needed for people to change their attitude about an issue. It involves a “Who said what to whom” approach (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953). 

• Who: The source of information
• What: The way of communication
• Whom: The target audiences

For our project, we made use of the Yale Attitude Change Approach to the “Who” is different researchers and experts that had research and statistical figures to back up our hypothesis. It is suggested that credibility has a huge influence on people’s behaviour and people who are experts in the field are believed to be more trustworthy for readers (Hovland & Weiss, 1951). 

The “What” is sharing information through social media, putting up posters around campus and sending the poster afterwards to all those who participated in our experiment. We put in a heading saying “Be in charge of your own happiness”. This would seem like the poster is not there to persuade them but there to give advice to anyone who is interested in improving their happiness. 

The “Whom” is everyone in the University of Warwick who might have come across our posters, those who follow our social media accounts and those agreed to take part in our 2-week experiment. According to Krosnick and Alwin (1989), young audiences are more persuadable than older adults. From this perspective, we have targeted our audiences with an age range of 18 to 30 as they are more susceptible to persuasion and therefore we believe that we can encourage them easily to change their behaviour. 

3.              Foundation of Gift-giving

According to Cialdini (2001), people feel obliged to always give back for what they have received. 

A good example in demonstrating the idea of gift-giving in behaviour change can be explained by the candy and tipping study (Strohmetz et al.,2002). The study used the norm of reciprocity by investigating whether offering an unexpected gift in the form of chocolate at the end of a dining experience would increase restaurant tipping behaviour, and results showed that just by giving a bar of chocolate at the end of a meal would increase tips by 2.7%. This study provides evidence that the act of giving a gift elicited people’s sense of obligation to return the favour even if the act is not required. 

For our project, we made use of Cialdini’s principle of persuasion through putting in the effort to design and draw a template for the gratitude diary and gifting it to whoever that agrees to participate in our project. With them having the diary in their hand, people might be more likely to reciprocate the gesture by completing the gratitude diary in order to make it up for receiving the diary we designed.  

4.              Foot in the Door Technique

This technique suggests that asking people to complete an initial small request would increase the likelihood that they would agree to carry out a bigger request later on (Freedman & Fraser, 1966).

According to Freedman and Fraser (1966), asking people to comply with a small request can increase the likelihood of them agreeing to a bigger request later on, which they would not have agreed to if they were asked outright. Their experiment provides evidence to this technique, where participants were more likely to agree to the request of putting a large and ugly sign in their backyard when they were first asked to sign a traffic safety petition. This can be explained by commitment, as the request for signing a traffic safety petition is not a big commitment and hence participants were more willing to accept it. Once the requester has engaged in a conversation with the participant, participants might find it hard to reject the request for a larger commitment. Also, Zanna, Olson and  Fazio (1981) suggest that participants might agree to the request in order to display behaviour that is consistent with the positive perception of self.

For our project, we asked our participants to complete the diary by writing down 3 things they have gratitude for every day for 2 weeks (small request). At the end of the 2 weeks, we asked participants to continue this habit of diary writing even after this study (bigger request). 82% of participants said that they would be willing to continue writing in a gratitude diary. This is how we incorporated the foot in the door technique to hopefully change people’s behaviour in developing a diary-writing habit. 

5.              Availability Heuristic

The Availability Heuristic strategy suggests that people tend to evaluate the frequency or probability of events by the ease with which examples come to mind (Tversky and Kahneman’s, 1973). This mental shortcut means that we believe our memories are a representative sample of reality even when it is not.

In the real world situation, the availability heuristic is being used frequently. As mentioned above, the study by Tversky and Kahnemans (1973) has investigated this effect on memory recall of words. Participants are asked to recall words that begin with K and words that have K in the third letter. As people can recall words that start with K more easily, participants believed that there are more words that begin with K but in fact, there are almost twice as many words with K as the third letter. 

For our project, by asking people to recall three things they feel grateful towards each day would increase their ease of retrieval of positive events when they are asked about their general wellbeing in life. They would naturally believe that they have higher satisfaction towards life when they are able to recall the positive events they have experienced especially after writing them down and reinforcing their memory about the events. According to the method of Availability Heuristic, gratitude diaries should lead to an increase in people’s level of happiness.

Project Expansion and the Measure of Behaviour Change

In the future, the project can be expanded to test larger sample size and a greater age range in order to compare the effectiveness of practising gratitude on happiness across groups. Also, as our experiment is based on the short-term effect of gratitude and happiness, the project can be extended to measure the long term effect of practising gratitude on happiness. For instance, testing a longer time interval, perhaps changing to a 2-months diary writing instead of 2-weeks.

Moreover, a more precise scale can be used to measure behaviour change. In our experiment, we measured the happiness rating based on a self-reported scale of 1 to 10 and thus a more specific measurement scale of happiness can be used, for example, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Argyle & Hill, 2002; Deiner, Emmons, Larsen & Griffin, 1985). 

On the other hand, such practices can be applied in the education system, where schools can implement a 15 minutes section each day before the end of school and ask every student to write down grateful things that have happened at school. By keeping a habit of writing a gratitude diary every day, we can also measure their happiness of different aspects. As such, relationship with teacher and friends, learning environment satisfaction can be used as a determiner for happiness.

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