Project Work Already Completed

The project to date has been heavily influenced by the work of a network of scholars on an earlier project phase. This earlier phase, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, made possible a comprehensive background study of theological, philosophical, and psychological foundations of gratitude to God. A group of scholars met at Biola University in January 2018 to explore the big questions concerning gratitude to God and to develop an action plan for moving forward scholarship in the humanities and empirical sciences. We also began to conduct empirical work on gratitude to God focusing first in the realm of measurement and testing associations of gratitude to God to human flourishing. Following the day and a half meeting, each advisor provided input on the takeaways from the meeting, much of what ultimately comprised the domains of inquiry articulated in the RFP document.

To date we have completed five studies on gratitude to God (GTG). In three studies, we developed a dispositional GTG measure (the GTG-T), and after an initial round of reviews we are currently revising our manuscript for publication in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. We showed that the GTG-T is a psychometrically sound instrument that has tremendous promise for future research studies on GTG, including those that may be proposed in the RFP competition. Indeed, we hope that the measure will be widely utilized. In these studies, we also showed that GTG prospectively predicted spiritual well-being, general gratitude, and confidence in the existence of God. The model that emerged out of these studies was that GTG prospectively led to generalized gratitude, which in turn enhanced subjective well-being. We are sanguine that this research program will help jumpstart the empirical science of GTG and provide the foundation for future investigations into the nature, causes, and consequences of theistic gratitude.

We also investigated the impact of grateful recounting on GTG in two intervention studies. In both studies, we used a gratitude 3-blessings intervention that has been shown to be successful in enhancing well-being (e.g., Watkins et al., 2015). Although the first study showed significant effects of the gratitude intervention on gratitude and subjective well-being (Watkins et al., 2016), the second study failed to show significant effects on well-being or gratitude (Hutton et al., 2018). In both studies, however, the gratitude intervention failed to show significant effects on GTG. We believe that this is primarily because of the insensitivity of our measure of state GTG, and we are currently conducting several studies in an attempt to develop a more sensitive measure of state GTG. In the fifth study, we are investigating how people’s experience of GTG varies with gratitude experienced toward humans. In this study participants were randomly assigned to recall a significant personal benefit caused by God, a human, or simply a “happy” occasion. They then reported on various emotions, appraisals, and thought/action tendencies that were associated with these experiences. The experimental methodologies used in these latter studies augment the psychometric approach from our initial forays. We presented preliminary results of these studies at the Western Psychological Association annual meeting in May 2019.

Finally, during this initial project we were able to investigate the relationship of joy to GTG. Recent interdisciplinary work has proposed a unique relationship between gratitude, GTG, and joy. In three studies, we developed state and trait measures of joy and in Study 3 showed a significant relationship between joy and GTG. These findings were recently published in The Journal of Positive Psychology (Watkins et al., 2018).