Meaning making enhances gratitude to God: The importance of spiritual appraisals.

Abstract

We sought to investigate whether making meaning from the COVID-19 pandemic might enhance positive spiritual and nonspiritual interpretations of the pandemic and in turn whether these appraisals would enhance gratitude to God. Participants (N = 272) were randomly allocated to one of three writing conditions: control, writing about their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, or writing about finding meaning (i.e., how they have grown, what they learned) from the pandemic. After writing, respondents reported current emotions and pandemic-relevant appraisals, followed by several exploratory measures. A two-way interaction between writing condition and emotion (F[4, 524] = 2.54, p = .04) indicated that both general gratitude and gratitude to God were enhanced in the meaning condition, but gratitude to humans was not. Both spiritual and nonspiritual benefit appraisals were greater in the meaning condition (F[2, 261] = 7.85, p < .001), and spiritual appraisals mediated enhanced gratitude to God. Analyses also indicated that spiritual benefit appraisals were unique to gratitude to God. Furthermore, gratitude to God was uniquely associated with variables related to spiritual well-being such as nearness to God and one's heartfelt experience of a loving God. Making meaning from the pandemic enhanced gratitude to God, and spiritual benefit appraisals uniquely predicted gratitude to God.