Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

The Grateful Are Also The Hopeful (#657)

Chi Ching Leung 1 , Eddie M.W Tong 1
  1. Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore

What do gratitude and hope have in common? Both are character strengths deemed to be valuable and fulfilling traits that enable us to have a good life. Previous studies have found that they are correlated but a question that has not been extensively examined is whether gratitude and hope can also influence each other reciprocally, thus suggesting that they may have a spiral and mutually reinforcing relationship. This relationship was examined through a series of cross-lagged longitudinal studies and ecological momentary assessment utilizing both samples of undergraduate students and drug offenders. Results showed that gratitude was able to predict for a positive increase in hope over time and conversely, hope was also found to predict for a positive increase in gratitude, thus providing support for a spiral and mutually reinforcing relationship between gratitude and hope. Previous studies have shown that positive emotions can accumulate and compound and results from the current study provide preliminary support that such a reinforcing relationship may also exist between gratitude and hope.