Robert A. Emmons

So a little science.

There was a study in 2003, two researchers, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, and they had people keep gratitude journals.

And we know what happened.

The gratitude group was more optimistic.

For the recommendations for this month, if you want to get deeper into the research, there's a lot of interesting psychology around gratitude.

Robert Emmons' book, Thanks, How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, is a great place to start.

The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan is another fascinating one.

And for your movie, if you want a movie that will make you look at your completely ordinary life differently, I recommend Soul, that Pixar movie that I feel like is so underrated.

Gratitude, I'm going to be straight with you because the research is much more modest than the internet often makes out.

In Robert Emmons and Michael McCulloch's experiments, people who focused on what they're grateful for reported emotional and interpersonal benefits.

But later reviews found that gratitude exercises work about as well as other positive exercises.

Not better.

Now, we've got good data on this.

In 2003, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough published a set of experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called Counting Blessings Versus Burdens.

They had people keep short weekly or daily records of things that they were grateful for and compared them with people who recorded hassles or neutral events.

The gratitude groups of across the board reported better wellbeing on multiple measures.

So I wrote a piece back in 2018 in First Things called Dying of Despair, where I unpacked some of the statistics on this.

Deaths of despair, the term was coined by two researchers at Princeton, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who pointed out that deaths by suicide drug overdose and alcohol related illnesses had been steadily rising again since 1999.

And they asked the question, sort of, what's behind this? What's going on? And the reasons for this, I think, are complicated.

But I'll just point to a few things that I think are crucial to understand.

I just, you're speaking my language so much.

I, [laughs] I think when it co- There's a couple books by author, I believe it's Robert Emmons.

He actually taught a course on gratitude, and he, he basically e- end up writing these series of books on the topic of gratitude.

One is Thanks! with an exclamation point, and I believe the other is, is Gratitude Works.

And yes, even in the worst of circumstances there are little things, maybe just little things that we can be grateful for, and it has the power to begin to shift how we see things.

And from, you know, going back to that, uh, conference where we met each other in November, uh, last November, um, Dr. Robert Emmons is the father of the science of gratitude and, you know, the, there's now so much science about the power of gratitude and how healthy it is and what it does inside of us physically-

Yes.

Yes

And there's been a lot of research done on gratitude.

Psychologist Robert Emmons is one of the preeminent people that's researched there.

And pause, this is simply, we're talking about pausing to appreciate positive moments, gifts, just noticing good stuff, whatever that might be.

Maybe noticing the sun rising in the morning or the rain that is happening in my community today.