Participants in the present study, adults living in the community, described their well-being and the stress they experienced each day for 2 weeks. Before completing these diaries each day, half of the participants described the things for which they felt grateful that day, and half completed the diaries without doing this. Multilevel modeling analyses found that daily feelings of gratitude were positively related to well-being at the within-person level, and lagged analyses suggested a causal link from well-being to gratitude. In addition, relationships between daily stress and daily well-being were weaker for people who had been asked to think about the things for which they were grateful than they were for those who had not been asked. These results suggest that counting one's blessing can reduce the negative effects of daily stress, which in turn may have positive long-term effects on mental health.

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The Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS) is widely used as a screening measure for psychological distress. Nevertheless, there is disagreement among researchers about the extent to which the HADS provides separate measures of anxiety and depression or a single measure of affectively based distress, and the present study was designed to contribute to this discussion. Participants (n = 951) who were psychologically distressed, but not hospitalized, completed a Polish language version of the HADS. A confirmatory factor analysis of participants' responses confirmed a model with two correlated factors with one crossloaded item. The estimated correlation between the factors was .68. These results suggest that the Polish version of the HADS consists of two correlated measures of affectively focused distress, depression and anxiety. Nevertheless, analysts and practitioners need to be cautious and take into account the possibility that the discriminant validity of these two scales may be somewhat limited given the correlation between the subscales and the possible cross-loadings of items.

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