The Effect of Gratitude Intervention on Life Satisfaction of University students: The Role of Self-Esteem

Abstract

Gratitude education is very common in traditional Chinese education. Gratitude is both an emotion and a trait (Rash et al.,2011). It is a tendency to perceive benefits bestowed by others or by some impersonal source, and accompanied by positive, social emotions (Lin C.C.,2015). As a trait, gratitude draws attention to positive outcomes in life (Emmons et al.,2019). Furthermore, this project chooses life satisfaction and self-esteem as variables in the research. ‘Life satisfaction is a subjective evaluation of overall quality of life’，and is the key dimension of subjective well-being (Proctor et al.,2009). Self-esteem is a sense of individuals’ general value or worth from his or her aspects (Rosenberg, 1979). Self-esteem is commonly considered as the “feeling that one is good enough” (Orth & Robins,2014). Life satisfaction and self-esteem are often used in studies of gratitude，but few of them find the complicated correlations between these three factors. So the purpose of this project is to explore whether gratitude interventions can enhance gratitude and subsequently increase life satisfaction and self-esteem.