Showing papers by "Michael E. McCullough published in 2004"

The Psychology of Gratitude

Abstract: Gratitude is one of the most neglected emotions and one of the most underestimated of the virtues. In most accounts of the emotions, it receives nary a mention. Even in broader surveys of the attitudes, it is often ignored.And in the most prominent lists of the virtues, notably Aristotle’s, it is not included. Gratitude is often included, of course, in Christian treatises on the virtues, but then it is usually directed only toward a single if exceptional object, namely God the Almighty.And yet gratitude is one of those responses that seems essential to and among civilized human beings, and perhaps it is even significant among some social animals, as de Waal and others have persuasively shown.

Gratitude in Intermediate Affective Terrain: Links of Grateful Moods to Individual Differences and Daily Emotional Experience.

Abstract: Two studies were conducted to explore gratitude in daily mood and the relationships among various affective manifestations of gratitude. In Study 1, spiritual transcendence and a variety of positive affective traits were related to higher mean levels of gratitude across 21 days. Study 2 replicated these findings and revealed that on days when people had more grateful moods than was typical for them, they also reported more frequent daily episodes of grateful emotions, more intense gratitude per episode, and more people to whom they were grateful than was typical for them. In addition, gratitude as an affective trait appeared to render participants’ grateful moods somewhat resistant to the effects of discrete emotional episodes of gratitude.

Gender and the natural history of self-rated health: a 59-year longitudinal study.

Abstract: Self-ratings of health are uniquely predictive of morbidity and mortality, and they encompass people's evaluations of many medical, psychological, and social conditions in their lives. However, the longitudinal trajectory of self-rated health has not been evaluated to date. In the present study, 59-year longitudinal multilevel analyses (1940-1999) of data from 1,411 men and women revealed that self-rated health was relatively stable until age 50 and then began to decrease in an accelerating fashion through the rest of the life course. Men had higher self-rated health throughout most of adulthood than did women but had steeper linear rates of decline. As a result, the gender difference in self-rated health disappeared by late adulthood.