Example Research Themes

Gratitude and well-being

PODCAST ON GRATITUDE (15MB): http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/alex.wood/gratitudepodcast.mp3

I became interested in gratitude as it was a key understudied emotion and personality trait. Although gratitude has been considered essential to well-being and the smooth running of society throughout history, when I begin this research in 2005 there were only a handful of papers on the consequences of being a more or less grateful person.

Wood, A. M., Joseph, S., & Linley, P. A. (2007). Gratitude. The Psychologist, 20, 18-21.

• First, we showed that people higher in gratitude didn't only feel the emotion more frequently, but appeared to have a life orientation towards noticing and appreciating the positive in the world, such as through appreciated their family and positions more, focused more the positive in the present moment, and living life to the full because of an awareness that life is short.

Wood, A. M., Maltby, J., Stewart, N., & Joseph, S. (2008). Conceptualizing gratitude and appreciation as a unitary personality trait. Personality and Individual Differences, 44, 619-630.

• Second, we showed why some people feel more gratitude than others after receiving help. Gratitude arises when a person receives help they think was (a) costly for their benefactor to provide, (c) valuable to them, and (c) given by their benefactor with altruistic intention, rather than through ulterior motives. Two people can receive the same help, with one feeling lots of gratitude, and the other none at all, totally dependant on how they view the help on these three dimensions. We found that grateful people habitually view the help they receive as highly costly, valuable, and altruistically intended, explaining why they feel such high levels of gratitude.

Wood, A. M., Maltby, J. Stewart, N., Linley, P. A., & Joseph, S. (2008). A social-cognitive model of trait and state levels of gratitude. Emotion, 8, 281-290

• Third, we showed that grateful people coped more positively with adversity, generally approaching the problem (rather than running away or denying it exists), and through being more willing to seek help from their friends. This partially explains why grateful people feel less stress in life.

Wood, A. M., Joseph, S., & Linley, P. A. (2007). Coping style as a psychological resource of grateful people. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 26, 1108 – 1125.

• Forth, we showed that grateful people naturally develop higher levels of well-being during a life transition. Prior to this research it seemed equally likely that gratitude lead to well-being, or that well-being lead to gratitude. We showed it was the former; grateful people naturally develop higher levels of well-being over time (perhaps because of their life orientation towards noticing the positive).

Wood, A. M., Maltby, J., Gillett, R., Linley, P. A., & Joseph, S. (2008). The role of gratitude in the development of social support, stress, and depression: Two longitudinal studies. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 854-871.

• Fifth, we were interested in what other personality traits grateful people had. Essentially, grateful people are more socially outgoing, less emotionally unstable, more socially supportive, and more open to new ideas. However, critically, the relationship between gratitude and well-being was unique, and not simply because grateful people had "positive" personalities.

Wood, A. M., Joseph, S., & Maltby, J. (2008). Gratitude uniquely predicts satisfaction with life: Incremental validity above the domains and facets of the Five Factor Model. Personality and Individual Differences, 45, 49-54.

Wood, A. M., Joseph, S. & Maltby (2009). Gratitude predicts psychological well-being above the Big Five facets. Personality and Individual Differences, 45, 655-660.

• Sixth, we showed that grateful people had better quality of sleep, and this was because they thought less negative thoughts before falling asleep (which impairs sleep quality), and more positive thoughts (which facilitate sleep quality).

Wood, A. M., Joseph, S., Lloyd, J., & Atkins, S. (2009). Gratitude influences sleep through the mechanism of pre-sleep cognitions. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 66, 43-48

Personality, well-being, and behavior

I have diverse interests in personality, and am generally fascinated about how people differ from each other, and what implications this has for their well-being. Some highlights of this research program are:

• Forgiveness is very important to well-being, and people who are neurotic, angry, and hostile are less likely to forgive people, and still reduce contact and desire revenge for their offender after two and a half years.

Maltby, J., Wood, A. M., Day, L., Kon, T., Colley, A., & Linley, P. A. (2008). Personality predictors of levels of forgiveness two and a half years after the transgression. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 1088-1094.

• People have stable beliefs about luck, either (a) believing in luck, (b) rejecting the concept of luck, (c) believing they are personally lucky, of (c) believing they are unlucky. These beliefs have very important implications for a person's well-being; for example, people who believe they are unlucky are less optimistic and hopeful, avoid problems, and have high emotional suffering.

Maltby, J., Day, L., Gill, P., Colley, A., Wood, A. M. (2008). Beliefs around luck: Confirming the empirical conceptualization of beliefs around luck and the development of the Darke and Freedman beliefs around luck scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 45, 655-660. (18/50 Psychology, Social.)

• Joining an extremist hate group depends on quite loosely help beliefs about how acceptable acts of hate are. These beliefs can be changed very easily through a brief lecture, and this would stop people joining these groups.

Amjad, N. & Wood, A. M. (in press). Identifying and changing the normative beliefs about aggression which lead young Muslim adults to join extremist anti-Semitic groups in Pakistan. Aggressive Behaviour.