gratitude and compassion Flashcards
Explain how gratitude and compassion give benefits over time, but have immediate costs.
-Although many dilemmas faced in social life might be framed as decisions between selfish and selfless behaviors, most may also be understood as a tradeoff between immediate and long term gain.
-Gratitude and compassion motivate decisions and behaviors meant to build resources/well-being for the long term- they increase the probability that individuals will act in ways that tend to increase the strength and stability of interpersonal relationships and well-being over time, even though such acts require immediate costs to oneself in terms of effort, time, or money.
Gratitude’s effects involve nudging people to forgo actions that- although bring short-term gain-tend to inhibit the accumulation of long term benefit.
What effect does gratitude have on helping behavior, relationships, and well-being?
Helping behavior
-Gratitude promotes helping behavior, which likely bolsters feelings of trust within a relationship that subsequently strengthen cooperation.
-Bartlett and DeSteno (2006) found that grateful individuals were more willing to agree to help their benefactor or a complete stranger subsequently, and devoted more effort to doing so than individuals who were experiencing a neutral affective state.
Relationships (forming and maintaining/strengthening)
-Gratitude plays a role in building a strong relationship (ex: gratitude little sisters felt during first week predicted feelings of relationship quality and vice versa for big sisters); it is a reciprocal relationship
-Expressing gratitude is associated with increasing relationship strength; higher levels of gratitude expression have significantly predicted higher levels of perceived relationship durability
-Gratitude and perceived responsiveness are linked such that gratitude functions to motivate behavioral responses that build and maintain relationship.
Well-being
-A tendency to experience gratitude has been found to positively covary with life satisfaction, psychological well being, and a sense of coherence; gratitude is linked to fewer depressive symptoms, lower aggression, and better physical health
- In numerous experiments, individuals completing gratitude exercises have demonstrated increased well being, happiness, and life satisfaction as soon as 1-2 weeks from the start of the intervention.; experiencing gratitude frequently aids individuals in achieving self-improvement goals
-Gratitude is related to decreased materialism; Feelings of gratitude led people to report higher satisfaction with life, which then led to reduced materialism
What is the difference between compassion and empathy?
Scholars now differentiate empathy from compassion stating that empathy is a process that allows an individual to understand another person’s mental state; compassion is different based on the motivations that underlie a person’s resonance with another’s mental state
While compassion includes the motivational component to relieve another’s suffering, empathy
refers to processes that provide access to the content or experience of another’s state
What effect does compassion have on social systems and well-being?
Social systems: Compassion promotes the attainment of cooperative social relationships. Cooperative groups accumulate the largest amount of resources over time compared with groups that engage in punitive action. Compassion is an effective mechanism for reducing escalations of violence
Well-being: May serve as a nourishing, replenishing experience that contributes to well-being. Caring for the well-being of others over time benefits an individual’s own psychological well-being (Crocker et al., 2010). Caregiving for a spouse predicted reduced risk of mortality (Brown et al., 2009)
This research goes against the notion that people become overburdened by compassion fatigue; compassion is different from empathic distress or empathy fatigue in the sense that compassion moves beyond stimulation of another’s pain and includes feelings of concern and love for those who suffer
Research also found that compassion can play a fundamental role in promoting psychological and physical well-being in relation to stress (compassionate goals can reduce stress reactivity to a stress-inducing task)
