Effects of a brief grateful thinking intervention on college students' mental health

Gratitude-based interventions have been shown to significantly improve positive indicators of mental health and reduce negative indicators of mental health. The present study used a randomized controlled trial design to test a brief grateful thinking-only exercise with a sample of college students (N = 97). Participants in the gratitude-based intervention condition (n = 54) were instructed to spend five minutes each day thinking about something they were grateful for, while participants in the activity-matched control condition (n = 43) were instructed to spend the same amount of time thinking about something they had learned recently. Descriptive results indicated that, compared to the control exercise, the grateful thinking-only exercise had greater therapeutic effects on happiness, life satisfaction, depression, stress, and negative affect. However, consideration of effect-size confidence intervals and associated inferential statistics suggested that we could not ultimately reject the null hypothesis. Overall, results suggest the need for including both activity-matched and passive control conditions within gratitude-based intervention research.