Gratitude, according to leading researcher Robert Emmons, is a two-way street: we affirm the good things we’ve received, and we also “acknowledge that other people…help us achieve the goodness in our lives.”
It’s only in the past few decades that researchers have started to investigate how we benefit from expressing gratitude and paying it forward. In this animation from the video series Braincraft, science communicator Vanessa Hill looks at research into gratitude — Here are two interesting takeaways:
We can trigger gratitude in the brain: Researchers studied the brains of participants who were asked to respond (in terms of how grateful they’d feel) to hypothetical scenarios where complete strangers saved their lives. From co-author Glen Fox, Phd: “when participants reported those grateful feelings, their brains showed activity in a set of regions located in the medial pre-frontal cortex, an area in the frontal lobes of the brain where the two hemispheres meet. This area of the brain is associated with understanding other people’s perspectives, empathy, and feelings of relief.”
Gratitude journals are worth keeping: In studies where participants regularly wrote down what they were grateful for, they reported improvements in mood, health, and overall outlook in life.
The post The Amazing Effects of Gratitude appeared first on Mindful.
from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.mindful.org/amazing-effects-gratitude/
No comments:
Post a Comment