Say THIS. It Could Change Your Life Say thank you. Every day. Several times a day. As often as you can. Consciously choosing to feel thankful and express your gratitude to others by saying thank you, will help you make positive changes in your own life and behavior, according to researchers from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Many of us think of gratitude as a passive gesture, rather than an active one. That is, we wait until something good happens and then we feel grateful. Gratitude isnt passive reflection. Its active, David DeSteno, a Northeastern professor of psychology, explained to HealthDay News. And its not about the past. Its there to help direct our behavior in the future. DeSteno found that when he and his colleagues set people up so they would feel grateful, they discovered that this thankfulness spurred those same people to act in ways that were more cooperative and less selfish. The study: DeSteno conducted two consecutive experiments with the same participants. In the first, the volunteers came to a lab to complete a task on a computer. Some--but not all--of the computers were rigged to crash. A kind stranger, who looked like he was one of the volunteers but in fact was part of the research team, offered to help fix the crashed computers. Immediately following this experience, the same participants played a standard economic game where people have the opportunity to either act strictly in their own self-interest or in a more cooperative way. The results: In general, the volunteers who had received computer assistance from the stranger were more likely to be cooperative when playing the economic game and felt more grateful than those who had no problems with their computer in the first part of the experiment. The takeaway: Gratitude helps guide behavior. That is, feeling thankful can help you to be less anxious and more helpful to others. --From the Editors at Netscape
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 15:23:45 +0000
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