The meaning and valence of gratitude in positive psychology

This chapter describes different kinds of gratitude that might differ in terms of their meaning and valence, and the possibility that people diverge in terms of conditions they place on when they believe gratitude to be appropriate. It considers what it means to describe gratitude - or hope, joy or awe - as “positive” traits, “positive” emotions or “positive” strengths of character. The chapter highlights how conceptualisations of a construct constitute essential information and that this information can feed into measurement of the construct. It focuses on gratitude, but the same approach could be extended to other constructs. The chapter demonstrates how appraisals of conceptions, emotions, attitudes and behaviours pertaining to gratitude are all necessary in order to comprehensively measure gratitude based on the test of multi-component gratitude measure. It suggests the widespread advocacy of gratitude in positive psychology be interpreted against findings which show that gratitude is not unambiguously positive.