The Role of Gratitude in a Positive Psychology Group Intervention Program Implemented for Undergraduate Engineering Students

Abstract

Over the past decades, research on positive psychology for building strengths has proliferated. The present study aimed to explore the effect of gratitude in a 5-week positive psychology group program for undergraduate engineering students which included an intermediary 2-week gratitude intervention. In a mixed-design, 69 students from three engineering departments of the School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (ASPETE), assigned to the intervention (N = 34) and the control group (N = 35), with an average age of 21.52 years (SD = 4.63), were administered the Gratitude Questionnaire—six item form (GQ-6), the Modified Differential Emotions Scale (mDES), the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), and the Life Orientation Test—Revised (LOT-R). The condition experimental vs. control group was designated as the between-subjects factor, and time, that is, baseline vs. post intervention, was set as the within-subjects factor. Students who received the intervention reported significantly higher levels of gratitude. The increase in gratitude was due to the positive psychology group program. In addition, gratitude showed a significant effect on happiness and optimism, but failed to attain a significant impact on positive and negative emotions and resilience. Further research is needed to elucidate the effectiveness of positive psychology programs for undergraduate engineering students and the intervening cognitive processes.

Effectiveness of an MPPI: Gratitude-Based Spiritual Group Guidance Program (GSGGP)

“…The results of Geier and Morris (2021) bear close resemblance to both the framework and outcomes of our own study. Similarly, the findings of Kalamatianos et al (2023) and Cunha et al (2019) align with our conclusions. Furthermore, a notable parallel across these studies and ours is the inclusion of experimental and control groups.…”

“…When comparing the post-intervention outcomes of the treatment group to the control group, the effect of the gratitude intervention was statistically significant and of moderate magnitude. In the study by Kalamatianos et al (2023), the focus was on understanding how the emotion of gratitude influences various aspects of positive psychology, such as positive and negative emotions, happiness, and optimism. They examined engineering undergraduate students as their study cohort.…”

The Impact of Resilience Interventions on University Students’ Mental Health and Well-Being: A Systematic Review

“…Eight studies implemented a non-randomised controlled trial (NRCT) study design [53,58,62,77,79,80,82,87]. Seventeen studies employed a pre-post without control group study design [48,50,51,59,60,[64][65][66][68][69][70]83,84,86,88,89,91], and twenty-two studies adopted a randomised controlled trial (RCT) study design [45][46][47]49,52,[54][55][56][57]61,63,67,[71][72][73][74][75][76]78,81,85,90].…”

“…Most of the studies recruited undergraduate students (n = 38) [45][46][47][49][50][51][53][54][55][56][57]59,[61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69]71,72,[74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82]84,85,87,88,90,91]. Only four studies recruited graduate students [48,58,69,83] and a subset did not specify, but all those not specifying focused on medical students [60,70,73,86,89]; as such, the level may not have been reported as medical degrees can include a typical undergraduate degree within the higher medical degree.…”

“…For mindfulness interventions, ten used face-to-face delivery [47,53,60,67,69,71,77,81,87,89] and eight used online delivery [49,[55][56][57]72,86,88,90]. Within the psychoeducation interventions, around half were delivered using face-to-face sessions (n = 5) [48,64,70,79,85] with the same number using online delivery [46,54,62,84,91]. Only one study used hybrid delivery, which incorporated face-to-face and online components [65].…”