tested, but the data that do exist is supportive. For example, grateful youth report high levels of Self-Esteem (Froh, Wajsblat, & Ubertini, 2008). They also report high levels of Self-Satisfaction concurrently (Froh et al., 2008).
There are reasons to believe that experiences of gratitude might be associated—perhaps even in a causal fashion with happiness and well-being. Researchers, writers, and practitioners have all speculated that gratitude possesses happiness bestowing properties. Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man (Chesterton, 1924). Several theorists and researchers have noted that gratitude typically has a positive emotional valence. Initial research suggests that gratitude is a moderately pleasant and activating emotion.
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Gratitude is linked with happiness, pride, and hope (Overwalle, Mervielde, & De Schuyter, 1995). In research on the scaling of emotion terms, gratitude tends to load on pleasantness and activation factors (Reisenzein, 1994). In an empirically derived taxonomy of emotion terms, gratitude was clustered in a category of positive, interpersonal feelings that included admiration, respect, trust and regard (Storm & Storm, 1987). In similarity judgments of emotions, thankfulness is rated as highly similar to joy and contentment, and as highly dissimilar to contempt, hate, and jealousy (Schimmack & Reisenzein, 1997). Gratitude was 1 of 50 emotion terms included in study of the structure of emotional meaning (Davitz’s, 1969). In addition to its merit as an intrinsically rewarding state,