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Kansha shite · Be grateful
100,099 People, and No Exercises at All
Most gratitude research asks people to do something. This review gathered every study that simply measured how grateful people already were, and looked at how they were doing.
Kansha shite, be grateful, is the third of the five precepts. It sits at the heart of Reiki self-practice.
The study
Gratitude as a way of being, rather than a task to complete
Psychologists call it dispositional gratitude: a settled tendency to notice and appreciate the good in what one has and what one is given. It is measured with a short questionnaire, most often six statements such as “I have so much in life to be thankful for.” Nobody is asked to write a letter or keep a journal. They are simply asked what they are like.
This review searched for every study, published or unpublished, that had measured gratitude this way in adults and related it to some indicator of wellbeing, from happiness and life satisfaction through to depression, stress and suicidal thinking. It then pooled all of them together.
- Design
- Meta-analysis of correlational studies
- Included
- 144 papers, 158 samples, 404 effect sizes
- Period
- Studies published up to December 2018
- Measure
- The GQ-6 questionnaire in over 75% of studies
What they found
How strongly gratitude went with each side of wellbeing
More gratitude, more of this
More gratitude, less of this
These are correlations. By the benchmark the authors use, anything above .1 is moderate and anything above .5 is strong. Every figure here sits in the moderate range, and several are close to strong.
Equally about feeling good and living well
Gratitude was tied just as strongly to the deeper kind of wellbeing, growth, purpose and relationships, as it was to happiness and life satisfaction. The two came out at .44 and .43, statistically the same. The authors say grateful people experience both forms of wellbeing equally.
Stronger where people were struggling
In samples of people with a clinical diagnosis, the links were consistently stronger than in the general population. For life satisfaction, .58 against .42. The authors cautiously suggest gratitude may matter most for people who are unwell.
Depression more than anxiety
Gratitude went more strongly with low depression (−.39) than with low anxiety (−.27). The authors wonder whether gratitude is a stronger buffer against the heavier conditions than the lighter ones, and call for more work on why.
No sign of publication bias
Three separate checks found no evidence that positive results had been favoured for publication. The review also included 29 unpublished dissertations, which is one of the better guards against a rosy picture.
Nothing here was trained, taught or practised for a fortnight. This is what already-grateful people look like, a hundred thousand of them.
Why this one sits closest to the precept
The precepts are not exercises. Kansha shite does not ask you to count anything or write to anyone. It asks you to be a certain way, and to be that way again tomorrow. Of all the research in this series, a review of dispositional gratitude is the nearest thing to measuring that.
What it found is worth holding onto. Grateful people were not only happier. They were equally more likely to be growing, to have purpose, and to be close to other people. That is the shape of a life, not a mood.
Read this part too
Limitations
The authors are candid that this review is correlational, even while they lean towards a causal reading.
- Correlation, all the way down. Every study here is a snapshot. Grateful people are happier. Whether gratitude makes them so, or happiness makes them grateful, or both come from something else, cannot be settled by this design.
- Self-report throughout. Both gratitude and wellbeing were measured by asking people about themselves, which means some of the correlation may be a person’s general tendency to answer positively.
- One questionnaire dominates. Three quarters of the studies used the same six-item scale, designed in the United States. Whether it captures gratitude the same way everywhere is an open question.
- Mostly young, mostly students. A large share of the samples were university students, though the authors found this did not much change the results.
- Culture was measured crudely. Individualism and religiosity were assigned by country, not asked of each person. The authors say no firm conclusions can be drawn from those moderators.
- Wide variation between studies. The pooled figures hide a lot of spread. In some samples the link was weak, in others very strong.
- Frozen at 2018. The review stops there. Anything published since is not included.
The research
Portocarrero, F. F., Gonzalez, K., & Ekema-Agbaw, M. (2020). A meta-analytic review of the relationship between dispositional gratitude and well-being. Personality and Individual Differences, 164, 110101.
This is research into gratitude, not into the system of Reiki, Reiki treatments or Reiki training. It is included here because gratitude is one of the five precepts.
For today only, be grateful.
Not as something you do, but as something you are, and then are again tomorrow.
