The following is excerpted from an online article posted by PsyPost.
A new study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology suggests that adolescents who become more grateful over time are less likely to experience depression—especially when their gratitude boosts their self-esteem. The research tracked hundreds of middle school students in China and found that distinct patterns in how gratitude developed over time were closely linked with levels of depression.
The researchers set out to explore a key question: How do changes in gratitude during middle school affect a young person’s mental health? While many previous studies have shown that gratitude and depression are related, most of that work relied on snapshots taken at a single point in time.
For their study, supervised by Professor Peilian Chi, the researchers recruited 660 students from two middle schools in Guangzhou, China. Participants were around 13 years old at the start of the study. Of the original group, 564 students completed all three waves of data collection. At each point, students completed well-established questionnaires measuring their levels of gratitude, self-esteem, and depression.
Gratitude was measured using a six-item scale that asked students how often they felt thankful for people and experiences in their lives. Self-esteem was assessed with the widely used Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and depression symptoms were evaluated using a brief version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. The researchers also collected information on students’ gender, age, and overall life satisfaction to account for these influences in their analysis.
he largest group (about 36 percent of participants) showed consistently low gratitude levels across all time points and was labeled the “low-gratitude-persistence” group. A second group, making up nearly 30 percent of students, started with high gratitude and continued to increase slightly over time—these students belonged to the “high-gratitude-increasing” group.
Another group, comprising about 24 percent, started with high gratitude but showed a decline, labeled the “high-gratitude-declined” group. The final group, about 11 percent of participants, began with low gratitude but improved significantly by the end of the study—this was the “low-gratitude-improving” group.
The researchers then looked at how these patterns related to depression in the final year of middle school. They found that students in the two increasing-gratitude groups—both those who started high and increased, and those who started low but improved—reported significantly lower depression scores than students in the low-gratitude-persistence group.
In contrast, students whose gratitude declined over time did not differ in depression levels from those with persistently low gratitude. This suggests that both the level and the direction of change in gratitude matter for adolescent mental health. Merely starting out with high gratitude did not protect students from depression if their gratitude declined during this critical period.
Self-esteem turned out to play a key role. When researchers examined whether changes in self-esteem could explain the link between gratitude and depression, they found strong evidence that it did. Students whose gratitude improved—either from a high or low starting point—tended to show increases in self-esteem, which in turn predicted lower levels of depression.
In fact, once self-esteem was accounted for, the direct relationship between gratitude trajectory and depression disappeared, suggesting that gratitude protects against depression mainly by supporting adolescents’ self-worth.
These findings support what psychologists call the “broaden-and-build” theory, which suggests that positive emotions like gratitude help people build psychological resources that can buffer them against stress and negative feelings. In this case, the resource being built is self-esteem.
Source: PsyPost
https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-links-gratitude-development-to-lower-adolescent-depression/
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