People who place too much emphasis on materialistic pursuits –
people for whom obtaining wealth and material possessions
takes priority over meaningful relationships, community involvement,
and spirituality – tend to be unhappy people. In general,
they are dissatisfied with their lives, they tend to experience high
levels of negative emotion and low levels of positive emotion,
and they are at risk for a variety of mental disorders. In contrast,
grateful people – people who readily recognize the many
ways that their lives are enriched by the benevolent actions of
others – tend to be extraordinarily happy. They experience high
levels of positive emotion, low levels of negative emotion, are
generally satisfied with their lives.
In other words, the hedonic profiles of materialistic people
and grateful people are mirror opposites. Is this just a coincidence,
or is there a deeper connection between materialism and
gratitude? We think the latter is the case: Gratitude and materialism
are negatively associated, and we suspect that their connection
could be a causal one.
The first cause for our suspicion that gratitude might reduce
materialism is Lerner and Keltner’s (2000, 2001) work on
affect–cognition relationships. Lerner and Keltner have shown
that emotions such as anger and fear can produce changes in
judgment and social cognition. Jackson et al. (2001) applied
Lerner and Keltner’s thinking to gratitude, demonstrating that
gratitude causes people to make stable, controllable causal attributions
regarding an individual who has enjoyed good fortune.
In other words, gratitude causes people to focus on other individuals
as causal agents, and benevolent ones at that: Recall
Dunn and Schweitzer’s (2005) finding that the experience of
grateful emotion leads people to become more trusting toward
third parties (particularly people with whom they are not well
acquainted). In this vein, we think that a specific emotion like
People who place too much emphasis on materialistic pursuits –
people for whom obtaining wealth and material possessions
takes priority over meaningful relationships, community involvement,
and spirituality – tend to be unhappy people. In general,
they are dissatisfied with their lives, they tend to experience high
levels of negative emotion and low levels of positive emotion,
and they are at risk for a variety of mental disorders. In contrast,
grateful people – people who readily recognize the many
ways that their lives are enriched by the benevolent actions of
others – tend to be extraordinarily happy. They experience high
levels of positive emotion, low levels of negative emotion, are
generally satisfied with their lives.
In other words, the hedonic profiles of materialistic people
and grateful people are mirror opposites. Is this just a coincidence,
or is there a deeper connection between materialism and
gratitude? We think the latter is the case: Gratitude and materialism
are negatively associated, and we suspect that their connection
could be a causal one.
The first cause for our suspicion that gratitude might reduce
materialism is Lerner and Keltner’s (2000, 2001) work on
affect–cognition relationships. Lerner and Keltner have shown
that emotions such as anger and fear can produce changes in
judgment and social cognition. Jackson et al. (2001) applied
Lerner and Keltner’s thinking to gratitude, demonstrating that
gratitude causes people to make stable, controllable causal attributions
regarding an individual who has enjoyed good fortune.
In other words, gratitude causes people to focus on other individuals
as causal agents, and benevolent ones at that: Recall
Dunn and Schweitzer’s (2005) finding that the experience of
grateful emotion leads people to become more trusting toward
third parties (particularly people with whom they are not well
acquainted). In this vein, we think that a specific emotion like
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..
