Autonomy in Gratitude Intervention, 2022

This study was a field experiment with a gratitude intervention for Taiwanese elementary-school students (N = 152, 54.6% girls, 45.4% boys). Adapted from existing interventions in the literature, we designed two parallel, 5-week in-class gratitude intervention programs, one with and the other without extra autonomy support components. We compared the programs' effects on students' gratitude, positive & negative emotions, life satisfaction, and academic engagement. We held workshops of the interventions first for teachers who were going to conduct the programs for their classes. The teachers then went on to run, in their classes, in order, the pre-test questionnaires, the intervention programs - one hour/class a week for 5 weeks - then the post-test. The classes were four 3rd-grade (two classes for the high-autonomy condition and two classes for the low-autonomy condition) and two 5th-grade classes (one for each condition). Classes included around 25 students each. In addition to the few questionnaires administered, we collected much qualitative material in various activities throughout the program (e.g., gratitude notes, personal drawings in gratitude diaries, photographs of class collective drawings on the walls). We are also happy to provide the intervention manuals on request.