Joy Is the Simplest Form of Gratitude

In 2003 the psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough divided a group of students into three. One group was asked to write down each week five things for which they were grateful. A second wrote five hassles, and a third wrote five events that had affected them. After ten weeks the first group reported feeling better about their lives, were more optimistic, and said they had fewer physical complaints, and they even exercised more. A simple exercise in noticing what one had received had increased happiness. The finding gives scientific support to a line of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, that joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

The statement connects two states that are commonly treated separately. Gratitude is the recognition that something good has come to us from outside ourselves, from a person, from fortune or from the order of things, and that we did not wholly earn it. Joy is the delight that arises when we receive or perceive something good. Barth's point is that joy is, in its essence, gratitude in its most direct and unforced form. A child who laughs when given a sweet is thanking, though she does not say a word.

The best known thinkers of gratitude have taken it as basic. Cicero wrote that gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all the others. Religious traditions build their practice on it, from the Jewish blessings said over bread and wine to the Christian grace before meals, and from the Hindu thanksgiving to the sun at Pongal and Makar Sankranti to the Muslim practice of shukr, thanks to God. Harvest festivals the world over, such as Onam and Thanksgiving, are occasions on which joy and gratitude are united in feasting.

Modern research has measured the link. Martin Seligman and colleagues found in 2005 that people who wrote and delivered a letter of thanks to someone who had been kind to them but had never been properly thanked were happier a month afterwards, and the lift in mood was one of the largest recorded in studies of simple exercises. Grateful people sleep better, have lower blood pressure in some studies and feel less lonely. Gratitude shifts attention from what is missing to what is present. It makes people notice the small goods of daily life that would otherwise be taken for granted.

Gratitude shifts attention from what is missing to what is present.

Why would joy be the simplest form? Because it asks nothing of us. Other forms of gratitude can be complicated. A person who owes a debt of thanks may feel obliged to repay, and the sense of obligation can be heavy. A formal expression of thanks can be hollow, and gifts are sometimes given in order to bind the receiver. But joy takes the gift as given. The person who delights in a good meal, a friend's visit or the first rain after a dry summer has acknowledged the goodness without having to calculate anything. It is gratitude without accounts, and it turns the ordinary into a gift.

Examples abound in the lives of people who have little. Visitors to poor villages often remark on the warmth of hospitality, in which a family that has barely enough offers food with evident happiness. Survivors of great hardship frequently describe an intensified joy in simple things, such as a hot drink or a day without pain. Viktor Frankl recalled in the concentration camp the intense delight of seeing a sunset glow on the wet ground. Hardship appears to sharpen attention to what is given, while abundance can dull it. The saying may explain why wealthier societies are not necessarily happier.

Joy seems also to be contagious in a way that complaint is not. A grateful teacher or parent creates an atmosphere in which others feel appreciated, and gratitude spreads along chains, so that those who have been helped go on to help others. Researchers have found that people who receive a kindness are more likely to be generous to strangers. Societies with high levels of trust and mutual thanks, such as those that carry the habit of saying thank you in daily dealings, are also more cooperative. Joy shared is a form of social glue.

Yet the statement has its limits. Gratitude cannot be commanded. Children told to be grateful for their food, and the poor told to be thankful for what they have, often experience the instruction as a way of silencing complaint. Gratitude can be used to keep people in their place, as when workers are told to be grateful for jobs that are exploitative. A forced thanks is the opposite of joy. The philosophical point is that a true response cannot be coerced, and the demand for gratitude is liable to extinguish the feeling it asks for.

Nor is all joy gratitude. A person may be delighted by a joke, by his own achievement or by a view from a mountain, in which no giver is evident. Some forms of joy arise from pure play, with no sense that anything has been received. Atheists and secularists can reasonably ask to whom they are supposed to be thankful for a sunrise. Many answer that gratitude can be directed at the universe, at one's ancestors, at the persons who made one's life possible or simply at the fact of being, without needing a recipient.

There is also the problem of bad times. To say that joy is a kind of thanks suggests that those who are sad are ungrateful, which is cruel and false. A grieving or depressed person cannot be joyful by an effort to count blessings, and well meant advice to think positively can add guilt to pain. The relationship runs most easily one way, from gratitude to joy, and a person who finds himself joyful may discover that he is grateful. Whether the reverse is possible, and whether joy might be a path to gratitude and not only its expression, is something the tradition treats as an act of grace, which seems to mean that it cannot be done on purpose.