The Psychology of Gratitude ROBERT A. EMMONS MICHAEL E. MCCULLOUGH, Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS The Psychology of Gratitude SERIES IN AFFECTIVE SCIENCE Series Editors Richard J. Davidson Paul Ekman Klaus Scherer The Nature of Emotion Anxiety, Depression, and Emotion Fundamental Questions Edited by Richard J. Davidson Edited by Paul Ekman and Persons, Situations, and Emotions Richard J. Davidson An Ecological Approach Boo! Edited by Hermann Brandstätter and Culture, Experience, and the Andrzej Eliasz Startle Reflex Emotion, Social Relationships, by Ronald Simons and Health Emotions in Psychopathology Edited by Carol D. Ryff and Theory and Research Burton Singer Edited by William F. Flack Jr. and Appraisal Processes in Emotion James D. Laird Theory, Methods, Research What the Face Reveals Edited by Klaus R. 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Solomon Jay Schulkin Bodily Sensibility Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion Intelligent Action Edited by Richard D. Lane and By Jay Schulkin Lynn Nadel The Neuropsychology of Emotion Edited by Joan C. Borod The Psychology of Gratitude Edited by ROBERT A. EMMONS & MICHAEL E. MC CULLOUGH 1 2004 3 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The psychology of gratitude / edited by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-515010-4 1. Gratitude. I. Emmons, Robert A. II. McCullough, Michael E. BF575.G68 P79 2003 155.2'32—dc21 2003005497 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Foreword Robert C. Solomon So after every case, you have to go up to somebody and say “thank you”? What a . nightmare. —My Cousin Vinny (Launer, Schiff, & Lynn, 1992) Gratitude is one of the most neglected emotions and one of the most underestimated of the virtues. In most accounts of the emotions, it re- ceives nary a mention. Even in broader surveys of the attitudes, it is often ig- nored.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 per- suasively shown. The neglect of gratitude is, in itself, interesting. Why does it not come to mind immediately when the social emotions and virtues are in question? Why should we be loathe to admit that we feel and should feel indebted to someone who is our benefactor and has helped us in some way? This way of describing the emotion is already a clue.We (especially in this society) do not like to think of ourselves as indebted.We would rather see our good fortunes as our own doing (whereas the losses and sufferings are not our fault), thus the neglect of gratitude. Like the emotion of trust (to which it is closely akin), it involves an admission of our vulnerability and our dependence on vi foreword other people. Thus gratitude lies at the very heart of ethics. It is more basic, perhaps, than even duty and obligation. The neglect of gratitude as an emotion might be partially explained by the fact that it is obviously what Hume called a “calm passion,” with none of the vehemence and drama of the “violent” passions. There is gushing grati- tude, to be sure, but such behavior is hardly the norm, even in cases where the boon is enormous and one’s gratitude is appropriately expansive. Usually, even when one is grateful to someone for saving one’s life, gratitude is better expressed through a quiet thanks and an appreciative silence, followed (usu- ally after a decent interval) by an appropriate gift or return favor. Gratitude is thus a poor candidate for a basic emotion or affect program of the sort that have been prominently defended by many recent psycholo- gists (e.g., Paul Ekman) and philosophers (e.g., Paul Griffiths). As far as we know, it displays no regular or recognizable facial expression; leads to no sin- gle sort of hardwired behavioral response; and cannot plausibly be traced, much less reduced, to any particular neurological processes. Also, gratitude endures. It is not, as Carroll Izard defined emotion, a “brief . response” (Izard, 2002, p. 248) If it is just a fleeting feeling, it hardly counts as gratitude. And gratitude, unlike hardwired behavioral responses, can be appropriate or inappropriate. Gratitude should be sincere. Perhaps, on occasion, gratitude may feel good, and we do speak of heart- felt gratitude, but I think the more usual feeling is one of slight discomfort (for reasons suggested previously) or, often, nothing at all. We may say that we feel grateful in describing or expressing our gratitude, but this is not usu- ally a phenomenological report of a unique kind of experience. (Most emo- tions, I argue, lack any specific feeling in this sense. Our phenomenological reports more likely consist of various perspectival and value-laden descrip- tions of the situation and objects of our emotion.) Some theorists (e.g., Paul Griffiths) might include gratitude among our higher cognitive emotions, if, that is, it were to count as an emotion at all. But emotions comprise a varied and expansive category in which all sorts of feelings are included, and it seems to me that excluding gratitude too readily suggests that gratitude isn’t “felt” at all. But to say this is to suggest that gratitude is just a social perform- ance, like unthinkingly saying “thank you” when the waiter brings some extra pads of butter to the table. As for the virtues, gratitude is not as active as most (courage and gen- erosity, for instance), nor is it an ongoing disposition to behave in a socially responsible or congenial manner (temperance and truthfulness, for exam- ple). We do not usually think of it as being cultivated as a habit (although some of its superficial trappings, such as saying “thank you,” obviously may be), and (like many virtues) its status as a virtue as opposed to an emotion is in much dispute. (Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, opposed the virtues, foreword vii which he insisted were “states of character,” to the passions, which he consid- ered merely episodic. Many philosophers have followed him in this; for ex- ample, Bernard Williams in his 1985 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.) But it is not always easy to distinguish between a dispositional state of character and a recurring passion, and (as Aristotle clearly argued) it is as nec- essary to cultivate the right passions as it is to cultivate the right habits and states of character. Both are essential to virtue. Indeed, they are often identi- cal. Cultivating courage, for example, is cultivating the right amount of and the right attitude to fear, and cultivating generosity is cultivating the right amount of and the right attitude to sympathy or compassion. It may be that when we speak of a grateful person (or a grateful nation) we are more often referring to a particular episode rather than a consistent state of character. But it does not follow that gratitude cannot be cultivated, or that it has noth- ing to do with character.Indeed, a single feeling of gratitude—for example, to one’s parents, to an influential teacher or guru, or to someone who has seri- ous changed or even saved one’s life—may come to define a good deal of one’s character and one’s sense of one’s own life. By contrast, being ungrateful is clearly the mark of a vice, whether in a single instance or as a long-term defect of character. Where gratitude is ap- propriate, even mandatory, being ungrateful is a sign or symptom of lack of socialization, whether evident in the inability to appreciate what others have done for one or, worse, the grudging resentment of one’s own vulnerability and the refusal to admit one’s debt to others. Gratitude directed to God may not be demeaning. After all, it is God we are acknowledging as our benefac- tor. But gratitude toward other people may be more of a problem.