Research suggests gratitude interventions-designed to increase appreciation of positive qualities, situations, and people in one's life-may improve psychological well-being (e.g.,

We propose a model of healthy intentional emotion regulation that includes (1) a large repertoire of (2) adaptive strategies that (3) one persists with despite initial negative feedback. One hundred forty-four undergraduates (average age = 19.20 years; 68% female, 79% Caucasian) completed a novel performance task indicating what they would think or do to feel better in response to eleven stressful vignettes. After their initial response, participants indicated four more times how they would respond if their previous strategy was not working. Raters categorized each response as an emotion regulation strategy and coded the adaptiveness of each strategy. Participants self-reported Neuroticism, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) symptoms, and depressive symptoms. We regressed each personality dimension and psychopathology symptom on our model of healthy emotion regulation. Neuroticism was negatively associated with adaptiveness and persistence. Extraversion was positively associated with adaptiveness. Conscientiousness was positively associated with repertoire, adaptiveness, and persistence, while BPD symptoms were negatively associated with all three variables. Depressive symptoms were negatively associated with persistence. These preliminary findings suggest that people with larger repertoires of more adaptive emotion regulation strategies who persist with these strategies despite initial negative feedback report less personality pathology and psychological distress.

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Gratitude interventions are often promoted as self-help exercises. However, expressing gratitude to benefit oneself may paradoxically undermine well-being, as this mindset shifts the focus away from the recipient of gratitude. Across two studies (N = 475), participants were randomly assigned to compose a gratitude letter using three rationales: self-focused (emphasizing benefits to the self), other-focused (emphasizing benefits to the recipient), and neutral (no rationale). The neutral group reported lower well-being than the two experimental groups (self-focused and other-focused) on a variety of outcomes. However, the experimental groups did not differ on main study outcomes, thus failing to support the hypothesis that self-focused reasons for expressing gratitude result in poorer well-being than other-focused reasons. However, text analyses revealed that the compositions of the letters differed between the self-focused and other-focused conditions. Individuals in the self-focused condition tended to write letters that were more self-referential, longer, less positive, and that used more insight/cognitive processing language, whereas individuals in the other-focused condition tended to write letters that were more other-referential, shorter, and more positive. Our results suggest that inclusion of a rationale enhances the effectiveness of a gratitude intervention, and the emphasis of the rationale can alter the way in which a gratitude letter is written. Implications for future research are discussed in light of these findings.