The Relation of Perspective-Taking to Gratitude and Envy Among Guatemalan Adolescents

Abstract

The social emotions gratitude and envy are central to the lives of Guatemalan youth and to their society more broadly. Perspective-taking, the social–cognitive process that allows one to assume another’s point of view, may affect both the experience and expression of gratitude and envy. In this convergent mixed-methods study, perspective-taking was studied in relation to gratitude and envy. Sixty-four Guatemalan adolescents, ages 12–17 ( Mage = 13.52 years, SD = 3.66, 53.1% girls), completed scales measuring gratitude, envy, and perspective-taking. For the qualitative portion, they read one gratitude and one envy vignette and completed a series of open-ended questions about the story characters. Two multiple regression analyses revealed that better perspective-takers were more grateful and less envious. Thematic analysis of the open-ended responses uncovered seven levels of perspective-taking. Complex perspective-taking was revealed when adolescents inferred the perspective of both story characters, created positive social outcomes even in situations of envy, and inferred consequences of the interactions. These findings imply that promoting perspective-taking may be one way to decrease envy and promote gratitude in this majority world cultural context. The findings from this study may inform the creation of culturally sensitive social-emotional learning programs that promote well-being through positive interpersonal relationships.

Guatemalan Adolescents' Hopes and Dreams

“…To understand the economic and financial situations of the participants, we provided them with a list of 14 household items (e.g., television, refrigerator, computer, bookshelf with books) and asked them to indicate whether they had each of these items in their homes. This is a method for measuring SES that has been used various times in Guatemala (Ashdown et al, 2017; Gibbons et al, 2016; Poelker et al, 2019; Poelker & Gibbons, 2018). Collecting an estimate of SES in this way allows researchers to understand the participants' financial situations relative to other participants in the sample and does not require the participants to provide an estimate of household income – which many adolescents would not know.…”

Comparing gratitude and pride: evidence from brain and behavior

“…Dispositional gratitude is positively correlated with perspective taking, empathetic concern, and fantasy scores (McCullough et al, 2002;Pang et al, 2022) in the scale of Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983). Furthermore, a higher level of perspective taking or cognitive empathy is associated with more gratitude in romantic partners (Gordon & Chen, 2013), children (Poelker & Kuebli, 2014), adolescents (Poelker et al, 2019), and students (Chen et al, 2020(Chen et al, , 2021Oriol et al, 2020;Shi & Du, 2020).…”

The Role of Subjective and Objective Social Status in the Generation of Envy

“…Furthermore, respondents were assured about their anonymity and were encouraged to answer honestly. In sum, despite the limitations of online hypothetical methods, they are widely used in envy research (for example, Parrott and Smith, 1993;Lange and Crusius, 2015b;Poelker et al, 2019) and there is also empirical evidence that people do not seem more reluctant to report envy than other negative social emotions (Hareli and Weiner, 2002).…”