Research Hit: A Short Gratitude Intervention Shown to Increase Academic Motivation
From the Archives:
Gratitude has been shown to improve mood, satisfaction, and well-being in certain contexts and with some people, and recent piece of research has lent more evidence to this. More interestingly is that the effects seem to last for months and not just for the period of the gratitude intervention!
So what did this study do?
The Japanese study investigated the effects on academic motivation on 84 students through daily gratitude journaling whereby participants would answer questions on their day online and one half of the group would add up to five things they are grateful for. This was done over only a two-week period.
They also measured academic motivation using the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS). This was done at the start of the intervention, at the end of the intervention and more interestingly for us, after 1 and 3 months.
The researchers found that there was a robust positive effect of increased academic motivation for the gratitude group. Good to know. But more importantly these effects remained for the full 3-month period.
So only a short 2-week gratitude intervention enabled increased motivation over three months. Not bad!