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Chapter 1

From Chapter 3

Types of Savoring -- see handout from Chapter 5

Chapter 8

Factors connecting Coping and Savoring: Social Support, Writing about life experiences, Downward hedonic contrast, Humor, Spirituality & Religion

Additional Suggested Exercises for Happiness Practicum on Savoring:

1. Simple Savoring Exercise -- You and an orange. 2. Complex Savoring Exercise -- Cooking dinner for a friend.

Watkins, "Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being"

Focus on emotional benefits of expressing gratitude.
Distinguishes gratitude as a practice vs. trait. Latter is habituated.
Researching the direction of causation -- p. 172ff: if it's possible to manipulate gratitude conditions and see a quasi-functional relationship on mood. Seems to have been weakly confirmed. Still possible to have bidirectional causation.
Series of studies on emotional benefits, p. 174ff -- "Participants in the grateful condition felt better about their lives as a whole and were more optimistic about the future than students in both of the other comparison conditions." 174. Second study tested specific technique of downward comparison and compared it to control and "hassles" condition.

1: emotional boost from "gift" character of gratitude experiences.
2: counteracting hedonic habituation
3: focusing attention away from upward comparisons toward downward comparisons.
4: coping -- evidence from p. 178ff.
5: increasing accessibility and recollection of pleasant life events -- note, this follows from memory bias studies (p. 179)

Emmons, "Gratitude, SWB, and the Brain"

Broad range of gratitude: from specific feeling about a particular event or circumstance to a general attitude toward life. Life as a gift.
Definitions: pleasant feeling from received benefit. "undeserved merit" From Fitzgerald (470): appreciation, goodwill, disposition that follows from appreciation and goodwill.
Gratitude can be a "virtue" if understood as a cultivated disposition to recognize undeserved merit.
Gratitude response is stronger if the beneficiary intends the benefit.

"as a cognitive—emotional supplement serving to sustain reciprocal obligations. -Simmel (471) "Thus, during exchange of benefits, gratitude prompts one person (a beneficiary) to be bound to another (a benefactor) during "exchange of benefits, thereby reminding beneficiaries of their reciprocity obligations."
"Trivers viewed gratitude as an evolutionary adaptation that regulates people's responses to altruistic acts. Gratitude for altruistic acts is a reward for adherence to the universal norm of reciprocity and is a mediating mechanism that links the receipt of a favor to the giving of a return favor."

Strong claim for long term effects of gratitude as a trait: p. 476 -- participants show SWB boost 6 months later.

Cognitive-affective neuroscience construct (What's happening to your brain when you experience gratitude?)
General hypothesis: we have structures for both perceiving gratitude in others and expressing it.
Specific hypothesis: Limbic prefontal networks involved: "; (1) the fusiform face-processing areas near the temporal—occipital junctions, (2) the amygdala and Limbic emotional processing systems that support emotional states, and (3) interactions between these two subcortical centers with the prefrontal regions that control executive and evaluative processes." 483. Like other prosocial emotions.

Specific hypothesis tested with studies of gratitude and mood induction in Parkinson's Disease patients.

Psychological attitudes at odds with gratitude: "' A number of personal burdens and external obstacles block grateful thoughts. A number of attitudes are incompatible with a grateful outlook on Hfe, including perceptions of victimhood, an in ability to admit one's shortcomings, a sense of entitlement, and an inability to admit that one is not self-sufficient. InIn a culture that celebrates self-aggrandizement and perceptions of deservingness, gratitude can be crowded out.

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