Assessing variations in the expression of gratitude in youth: A three-cohort replication in southern Brazil

Abstract

Children are not born grateful; their understanding and expression of gratitude develops during childhood and adolescence. We used a qualitative measure designed to assess how youth would respond to a benefactor, hypothesizing that their types of responses would systematically alter with age, and were able to test the reliability of this measure via replication across three cohorts. Participants (N = 1101) aged 7 to 14 constituted three independent cohorts (2008, 2012, and 2015-2017) from the same southern Brazilian city. Participants' responses were reliably coded into three types of gratitude (verbal, concrete, and connective); across samples, older youth were more likely to express verbal and connective gratitude; younger youth were more likely to express concrete gratitude. The age-related patterns of expression were very similar in each of the three samples (one discrepant result from nine possible), suggesting that it is a reliable measure with which to assess age-related changes in the expression of youth gratitude. Gratitude, we suggest, is not simply a unidimensional construct allowing judgments of how grateful individuals are; instead, our research suggests that youth of different ages express different types of gratitude, increasingly more complex, the most sophisticated of which comes closest to gratitude as a virtue.

How weird is the development of children’s gratitude in the United States? Cross-cultural comparisons.

“…One is the Gratitude Assessment Questionnaire-Child (GAQ-C: Freitas & Tudge, 2010), whose items deal with human benefactors and a willingness to reciprocate to them and which has good psychometric qualities (Liang et al, 2021). Nonetheless, this measure (like existing appreciation scales) only permits variations in quantitative extent of gratitude and there is evidence that children and adolescents in different societies express qualitatively different types of gratitude (Baumgarten-Tramer, 1938;Freitas et al, 2011Freitas et al, , 2021Wang et al, 2015).…”

Struktura czynnikowa wdzięczności. Wstępne badania adaptacyjne nad skalą SGRAT-PL

“…"dobrego życia", zwłaszcza poczucia szczęścia (Watkins, 2014). Warto jednocześnie podkreślić, że umiejętność doświadczania i wyrażania wdzięczności zaczyna się rozwijać już w dzieciństwie i kształtuje się na kolejnych etapach życia człowieka (Freitas et al, 2019). Poszerza to obszar psychologicznych zainteresowań badawczych i aplikacyjnych zarówno o zagadnienia naturalnych mechanizmów jej powstawania i podtrzymywania (Lyubomirsky et al, 2011), jak i intencjonalnego "wychowania do wdzięczności" czy też wspomagania osób dorosłych w formie coachingu (por.…”

“Gratitude is thanking someone, and happiness is showing it”: A qualitative study of Colombian children’s perspectives on gratitude.

“…Additionally, emotion comprehension can be linked to the expression of gratitude, in the sense that children develop an ability to recognize that doing so can foster positive emotions in their benefactors and others. Freitas and colleagues (2011) established that expressions of gratitude differ dramatically according to age (see also Freitas et al, 2021;Oros et al, 2015;Palhares et al, 2018). The first type of expression to appear in children is verbal gratitude (saying thank-you), which was present across the entire age range of the Freitas et al (2011) study, from 7 to 14 years.…”

“…Children's expressions of gratitudeFor this category, different expressions were coded with pre-established categories, using the classification ofFreitas et al (2021) as a guide. In all groups, four forms of expression of gratitude were identified: concrete (46.46%), verbal (27.78%), connective (17.17%) and finalistic (8.59%).…”