Dispositional Gratitude Moderates the Association between Socioeconomic Status and Interleukin-6

Abstract

Socioeconomic disparities in health are prevalent and growing in importance as a concern among academics, policymakers, and the general public. However, psychological resources that can narrow such disparities have not been well-examined. The current study examined the moderating role of dispositional gratitude in the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and inflammation risk as an index of health. Participants consisted of 1,054 midlife adults from the biomarker project of the Midlife in the United States. Inflammation risk was measured by interleukin-6 biomarker and SES was operationalized by education attainment and income. We found that dispositional gratitude significantly moderated the relationships between SES and interleukin-6. Among individuals with low dispositional gratitude, higher SES was significantly associated with lower levels of interleukin-6. However, the association between SES and interleukin-6 was not significant among individuals with high dispositional gratitude. More importantly, the findings remained robust after controlling for demographic characteristics, health status, health behaviours, and personality traits. Our findings suggest that gratitude may serve as an important psychological resource in attenuating health-related risk from socioeconomic stressors.

The Effect of State Gratitude on Cognitive Flexibility: A Within-Subject Experimental Approach

“…The present finding allows us to identify a significant boundary condition around the potential benefits of the experience of gratitude. Despite previous findings consistently demonstrating the association between gratitude and both physical and socioemotional well-being [20,71,72], the present study indicates that the benefits of gratitude may not apply across all domains in life. It may be argued that gratitude does not confer benefits on higher-order cognitive performance, such as cognitive flexibility.…”

“…Another recent study by Ksenofontov and Becker [64] reported that expressing gratitude to high-power groups that had committed an offence resulted in less protest behaviors in low-power groups. Although gratitude has been consistently linked with socioemotional and health benefits [20,23,65], the current study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that the practice of gratitude may not always be advantageous, especially in the domain of cognitive flexibility.…”

“…Furthermore, the experience of gratitude is inherently relational; it extends beyond the individual experiencing it, and towards the social world we live in [18]. Importantly, research on gratitude has demonstrated its positive benefits for physical health [19][20][21], emotional well-being [22,23], and social outcomes [24,25]. Despite the numerous benefits that gratitude confers across these different domains, less has been studied about the impact of gratitude on cognition, specifically in the domain of cognitive flexibility [26].…”

Cross-Cultural Nomological Network of Gratitude: Findings From Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) and Japan (MIDJA)

“…Furthermore, prior studies have revealed that a grateful attitude is negatively correlated with harmful psychological tendencies such as avoidance and revenge motivations (Szcześniak and Soares, 2011). Hartanto et al (2019) found that higher trait gratitude weakens the negative effect of socioeconomic status on health outcomes. Such empirical investigations hold a variety of practical implications in research as well as clinical settings.…”

Systemic inflammation is associated with differential neural reactivity and connectivity to affective images

“…Fewer studies have explored the bidirectional links between positive affect and levels of inflammation, especially as they relate to neural functioning. This paucity of work is surprising, considering that several studies have found that both dispositional positive affect ( Marsland et al., 2006 ; Stellar et al., 2015 ; Hartanto et al., 2019 ) and momentary positive affective states ( Steptoe et al., 2005 ) are associated with lower levels of inflammation. To date, no known neuroimaging studies have examined the efferent pathway or how the induction of a positive affective experience influences levels of inflammation.…”