Gratitude facilitates healthy eating behavior in adolescents and young adults
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Gratitude facilitates healthy eating behavior in adolescents and young adults
Interventions aimed at improving dietary habits remain an urgent area of research, as rising obesity rates are projected to spur consequent increases in physical health concerns, mortality rates, and health-related economic burden in the United States over the coming decades (Wang, McPherson, Marsh, Gortmaker, & Brown, 2011). Preventing obesity in adolescents and young adults may be particularly critical, as the majority of overweight youth maintain their weight status into adulthood (Magarey,
Participants
Data for this study come from a broader project examining the impact of expressing gratitude on several outcomes not relevant to our present research questions, including implicit theory of willpower and body shame. See Supplementary Materials for a list of measures not reported in the present analyses. Participants (N = 327) were undergraduate students recruited for a study on “Positive Activities and Health.” Our planned sample size was 300 students total (n = 100 per cell), and no analyses
Results
Contrary to our hypothesis, omnibus one-way analyses of variance did not reveal significant differences by condition in eating behavior at T2 (F[2, 252] = 1.06, p = .36) or at T3 (F[2, 246] = 0.51, p = .60). Additional analyses revealed no significant differences in self-reported state gratitude, positive affect, negative affect, or intended effort between conditions at any time point (all Fs < 2.33, all ps > .10; see Supplementary Materials for statistics). Next, we explored changes in eating
Discussion
As experimental condition did not impact our outcomes of interest, it appears that our gratitude-to-others and gratitude-to-self manipulations in this study were unsuccessful at eliciting stronger feelings of state gratitude relative to the event-listing condition, possibly due to our novel instructions inadvertently eliciting defensiveness or other negative states (see General Discussion for full list of potential reasons). Further, participants across all conditions reported eating more
Study 2
In Study 2, we sought to strengthen our experimental manipulation of gratitude and to expand upon our findings from Study 1 in a larger sample of adolescents. This study was conducted as part of a broader project examining the impact of expressing gratitude on several outcomes not relevant to our present research questions, including life satisfaction, improvement motivation, and grade point average (Armenta, 2017). See Supplementary Materials for a list of measures not reported in the present
Participants
Ninth and tenth graders (N = 1017) from four different high schools across the United States (n = 3 schools in the Los Angeles area; n = 1 in New York City; n = 2 public schools; n = 2 independent schools) participated in this study. Due to the difficulty of collecting data in applied settings such as high schools, our planned sample size was 200 students total (n = 50 per cell). However, additional funding and extraordinarily high student and teacher interest in the study enabled us to
Manipulation check
To confirm whether our manipulation of gratitude did indeed induce state gratitude, we used a planned contrast comparing the three gratitude conditions to the control condition. Immediately after the writing activity at T1, participants in the gratitude conditions reported higher state gratitude, relative to participants in the control condition, t(962) = 2.80, p < .01, r = 0.09. Additional analyses revealed that participants in the gratitude conditions also reported higher positive affect, t
Discussion
Our results suggest that gratitude may foster positive change toward healthier eating behavior among 9th and 10th grade students. The stronger gratitude writing prompts used in this study elicited more feelings of gratitude and general positive affect, and less negative affect, relative to the control condition. Subsequently, students in the gratitude conditions also reported healthier eating habits over time. Notably, this effect was evident, despite the fact that we did not explicitly
General discussion
Across two diverse samples of adolescents and young adults, we found evidence that gratitude may facilitate change in healthy eating behavior. In Study 1, contrary to our primary hypothesis, no group differences emerged between gratitude writing activities and the control activity on shifts in healthy eating across our 2-week intervention. However, in line with our theorizing, undergraduates who reported more state gratitude after a writing activity showed subsequent improvements in healthy
Conclusion
Across two diverse samples of adolescents and young adults, we found evidence that gratitude may facilitate improvements in healthy eating behavior, and that this salubrious effect is in part mediated by reductions in negative affect. Given their relative ease of dissemination and implementation, gratitude interventions may serve as particularly effective boosters when coupled with more traditional eating behavior interventions. Thus, gratitude may be a fruitful avenue for young people who wish
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Gratitude
2023, Encyclopedia of Mental Health, Third Edition: Volume 1-3Eudaimonia and flourishing
2023, Encyclopedia of Mental Health, Third Edition: Volume 1-3Experimental effects of social behavior on well-being
2022, Trends in Cognitive SciencesCitation Excerpt :Gratitude is a state or emotional response elicited by the recognition that one has received a benefit from an external source [25]. Like prosocial behavior, expressing gratitude has established benefits for individual well-being; numerous experiments have shown that engaging in gratitude activities leads to positive outcomes such as increased positive emotions, prosocial behavior, life satisfaction, and health behaviors [26–31], although the effect sizes for such interventions tend to be small [32]. Characterized as a self-transcendent emotion [33], gratitude is especially relevant in social contexts, and many gratitude interventions involve expressing gratitude to another person (either shared publicly with the benefactor or expressed privately in written form).
Gratitude intervention optimizes effective learning outcomes in Filipino high school students: A mixed-methods study
2022, Computers and EducationCitation Excerpt :Studies have demonstrated that gratitude has been related to many desirable outcomes such as subjective well-being (Emmons & McCullough, 2003; Froh et al., 2009, 2011, 2014), healthy eating behaviors (Fritz et al., 2019), school engagement (Valdez, Yang, & Datu, 2017; King & Datu, 2018), and academic achievement (Froh et al., 2011). Gratitude interventions have been found to be effective in improving well-being (i.e., Liao & Weng, 2018; Valikhani et al., 2019; Watkins et al., 2018), mental health (i.e., Valikhani et al., 2019; Wong et al., 2018), social relationships (Algoe et al., 2010; Gordon et al., 2011; Lambert et al., 2010), and even physical health (Fritz et al., 2019; Jackowska et al., 2016; Millstein et al., 2016). However, meta-analytic reviews have raised issues regarding the effectiveness of existing gratitude interventions in improving well-being and mental health outcomes (Davis et al., 2016; Renshaw & Steeves, 2016).
Health behavior adherence and emotional adjustment during the COVID-19 pandemic in a US nationally representative sample: The roles of prosocial motivation and gratitude
2021, Social Science and MedicineCitation Excerpt :In addition, evidence suggests that gratitude motivates cooperation with others at the expense of personal gains (Bartlett and DeSteno, 2006; DeSteno et al., 2010), which may be especially important in motivating health behavior change in response to COVID-19. Finally, although few studies connect gratitude to specific health behaviors, in one longitudinal experiment, expressing gratitude led to increases in healthy eating behavior (Fritz et al., 2019). Gratitude is also linked with benefits to emotional well-being and mental health (Cregg and Cheavens, 2020; Davis et al., 2016; Dickens, 2017).
Positive affect and behavior change
2021, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences