How can I thank you? Highlighting the benefactor’s responsiveness or costs when expressing gratitude

Abstract

Despite growing evidence that showing gratitude plays a powerful role in building social connections, little is known about how to best express gratitude to maximize its relational benefits. In this research, we examined how two key ways of expressing gratitude—conveying that the benefactor’s kind action met one’s needs (responsiveness-highlighting) and acknowledging how costly the action was (cost-highlighting)—impact benefactors’ reactions to the gratitude and feelings about their relationship. Using observer ratings of gratitude expressions during couples’ live interactions ( N = 111 couples), and benefactors’ self-reports across a 14-day experience sampling study ( N = 463 daily reports), we found that responsiveness-highlighting was associated with benefactors’ positive feelings about the gratitude expression and the relationship. In contrast, cost-highlighting had no such effect. These findings suggest that expressing gratitude in a way that highlights how responsive benefactors were may be critical to reaping the relational benefits of gratitude and have practical implications for improving couples’ well-being.

Implementation intentions to express gratitude increase daily time co-present with an intimate partner, and moderate effects of variation in CD38

“…(See Supplementary Information for similar findings based on rs3796863, another variant in CD38 .) Importantly, although the key finding of condition on change in time spent was modulated by CD38 status, the effective genotype represented the majority of expressers in our sample (63.6%); that is, consistent with the broad literature on expressed gratitude 15 , 17 , most people have this capacity.…”

“…Methodologically sophisticated longitudinal dyadic studies show that expressing gratitude is associated with beneficial relational outcomes for both members of an ongoing relationship independently of social support and other behaviors 14 , 15 . Critical for the present work, gratitude is frequently expressed between romantic partners in everyday life 15 – 17 , and both one-time in-lab experiments as well as correlational evidence suggest that gratitude expression appears to draw the other partner in to the relationship 12 , 18 – 21 , creating a positive feedback loop between both people 22 , 23 . Expressed gratitude is thus a prime behavioral target in order to establish the causal influence of relationship behaviors on couples’ outcomes.…”

Relationship functioning following a large-scale sacrifice: Perceived partner prosociality buffers attachment insecurity.

“…Our findings replicate research on perceived partner gratitude protecting avoidant individuals against lower relationship well-being (Park et al, 2019) and suggest that the benefits of gratitude generalize to avoidant individuals who made a large-scale sacrifice for their partner. Future research could consider how the content of the gratitude an individual expresses (e.g., Park et al, 2020) may be more or less effective at buffering avoidantly attached individuals against specific relational outcomes.…”

Lightening the load: Perceived partner responsiveness fosters more positive appraisals of relational sacrifices.

“…Participants were compensated with $40 CAD for the lab session and the 2-week follow-up survey. The data come from a larger study on relationships (for further details see: Le et al, 2020;Park et al, 2020). A minimum sample size of 100 couples was specified prior to data collection based on available budget and sample sizes typically used in relationship studies as well as previous studies specifically examining outcomes among couples requesting a change from each other (Overall et al, 2006(Overall et al, , 2009.…”