More than 2,000 of you took our recent gratitude quiz, which measures how grateful you are for the (sometimes hidden) gifts that come your way, large and small.
After you completed the quiz, you learned how your level of gratitude might affect your levels of positive emotion, physical health, the quality of your relationships, and your overall life satisfaction.
But the results also tell us about the gratitude of the Greater Good community as a whole—and it seems like you’ve been taking to heart our articles by gratitude expert Robert Emmons and absorbing the lessons from our new project on Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude. And have you been keeping a gratitude journal to boot?
Your average score was 85 out of 105, putting you in the “high gratitude” score range (well, it’s the very bottom of the high range, but be grateful for what you’ve got, right?).
When we analyzed the results more closely, here’s what we found:
• Gender and age seem to matter: Women generally reported experiencing more gratitude then men. Older respondents also reported more gratitude, with higher levels generally reported for each decade of life.
• Your employment status seems to matter: Self-employed people and stay-at-home parents reported the most gratitude; unemployed people and students reported the least. In the middle were all the other people with jobs, and the retired. This was all true regardless of their gender or age.
• Spirituality matters—a lot: The more spiritual people reported to be, the more gratitude they experienced, with “extremely” spiritual people scoring about 20 percent higher on average than people “not at all” spiritual. Again, this was true regardless of gender or age.
This last result is consistent with research linking gratitude and spirituality, including a seminal study on gratitude by Emmons and his colleagues. This could be because a focus on some higher power or order to things makes people feel more grateful—or as Emmons and his team suggests in that study, it could be because being focusing on good things in life leads people to become more spiritual or religious.
But we want to hear what you make of these findings. Please weigh in with a comment below.
Also please take our new quiz on compassionate love. And if you still haven’t taken our quick gratitude quiz, it’s not too late. You’ll probably be grateful that you did.
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