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Assessing variations in the expression of gratitude in youth: A three-cohort replication in southern Brazil

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Abstract

Children are not born grateful; their understanding and expression of gratitude develops during childhood and adolescence. We used a qualitative measure designed to assess how youth would respond to a benefactor, hypothesizing that their types of responses would systematically alter with age, and were able to test the reliability of this measure via replication across three cohorts. Participants (N = 1101) aged 7 to 14 constituted three independent cohorts (2008, 2012, and 2015–2017) from the same southern Brazilian city. Participants’ responses were reliably coded into three types of gratitude (verbal, concrete, and connective); across samples, older youth were more likely to express verbal and connective gratitude; younger youth were more likely to express concrete gratitude. The age-related patterns of expression were very similar in each of the three samples (one discrepant result from nine possible), suggesting that it is a reliable measure with which to assess age-related changes in the expression of youth gratitude. Gratitude, we suggest, is not simply a unidimensional construct allowing judgments of how grateful individuals are; instead, our research suggests that youth of different ages express different types of gratitude, increasingly more complex, the most sophisticated of which comes closest to gratitude as a virtue.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Lia B. L. Freitas & Fernanda Palhares

  2. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, USA

    Elisa A. Merçon-Vargas

  3. Department of Human Development and Family Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Stone 246, Greensboro, NC, 27402-6170, USA

    Jonathan R. H. Tudge

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  1. Lia B. L. Freitas
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  4. Jonathan R. H. Tudge
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Correspondence to Jonathan R. H. Tudge.

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Grant Support

Lia Freitas, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), #302688/2015-3 and 301714/2012-6, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), BEX 2038/09-9; Elisa Merçon-Vargas, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) BEX 0959/12-0; Fernanda Palhares, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), #001; Jonathan Tudge, The John Templeton Foundation, #43510.

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On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Each study was approved by the appropriate ethics committee of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, and informed consent was appropriately gained from all participants in full compliance with ethical standards.

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Freitas, L.B.L., Merçon-Vargas, E.A., Palhares, F. et al. Assessing variations in the expression of gratitude in youth: A three-cohort replication in southern Brazil. Curr Psychol 40, 3868–3878 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00334-6

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