Gratitude, Anxiety and the Brain

Robert Emmons wrote in Greater Good Magazine on 16 November 2010, in his article Why Gratitude Is Good, that "Gratitude blocks toxic, negative emotions, such as envy, resentment, regret". He went on, "You cannot feel envious and grateful at the same time", and he calls the two incompatible feelings.

In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2002, Michael McCullough, Emmons and Jo-Ann Tsang report four studies of the grateful disposition. The third found gratitude negatively associated with envy and with materialistic attitudes.

Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough published the founding experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2003. In three studies they assigned people at random to list blessings, hassles or neutral events, weekly in the first study and daily in the second, and the third study enrolled adults with neuromuscular disease. They report heightened well-being on several, though not all, of their measures, and in their own summary the clearest result was a rise in positive mood.

Two meta-analyses pooled the later trials. Don Davis and his colleagues, in the Journal of Counseling Psychology (2016), found a gain in well-being against an alternative activity (d = .17 across 20 studies). Across 5 studies the effect on anxiety could not be told apart from zero, and against a psychologically active comparison there was no gain. David Cregg and Jennifer Cheavens, in the Journal of Happiness Studies (2021), pooled 27 studies. They found what they call a small effect on symptoms of depression and anxiety, at the end of the practice and at a later follow-up.

These sizes measure what a few weeks of an exercise adds over a comparison group. The difference between grateful and anxious people is the surveys' measure, given above.

In Frontiers in Psychology in 2015, Glenn Fox, Jonas Kaplan, Hanna Damasio and Antonio Damasio reported scanning participants with functional MRI while they imagined receiving help in stories drawn from Holocaust survivors. The participants' ratings of gratitude correlated with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex.

In NeuroImage in 2016, Prathik Kini and his colleagues reported on adults entering therapy for depression or anxiety. Those who wrote letters of gratitude showed, three months later, significantly greater response to gratitude in the medial prefrontal cortex during a pay-it-forward task.

Emmons's sentence names envy, resentment and regret, and no study cited here measured whether the brain can hold gratitude and anxiety at the same moment. The surveys show the two running in opposite directions across people.

A sentence that says gratitude cures anxiety claims more than the trials carry, since the authors of the 2021 meta-analysis call the effect of a practice of thanks on symptoms small.

A survey that measures people once leaves open which comes first, and the two studies of Wood and his colleagues measured students twice and found gratitude leading to lower stress and depression.

The two imaging studies measured activity in regions of the cortex, and none of the studies cited here measured a chemical messenger.

Fox and his colleagues report a correlation in people imagining help, which shows that felt gratitude and that brain activity go together and leaves open which one leads to the other.