Can Gratitude Help Couples Through Hard Times?

From Greater Good Science Center's Magazine:

New research suggests that thanking our partners for supporting us through hardship may increase their joy and satisfaction in giving.

BY JILL SUTTIE | MAY 24, 2018

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When my best friend went through multiple surgeries and dislocations following a botched hip replacement, she was in near-constant pain. Her husband rose to the challenge of caring for her, but it wasn’t always easy for him. Nor was it easy for my friend, who vacillated between gratitude and frustration over his care. 


“I often had to ask for help, which didn’t feel great,” my friend told me. “I felt apologetic, but I didn’t have much choice. It’s hard to give, but it’s also hard to ask.”

Care taking for someone can be a challenge, but it’s especially charged when their needs are frequent and long-term. A caregiver may feel obligated to help, but doing so may bring little joy or sense of meaning, making it hard to sustain. And it can be equally stressful for the receiver of care.Our close relationships are an important part of a meaningful life. But what happens when someone we love is sick or going through a very rough time, and we are called upon to be a helper over and over again?

How can couples improve this dynamic? New research suggests that what motivates people to help is crucial—and that motivation is affected by both their interactions with the person they’re caring for and their life outside caregiving.

Why do you help?

Researchers who study motivation identify two basic types: autonomous or intrinsic motivation—when you do something because it brings you joy, satisfaction, or meaning—and controlled or extrinsic motivation—when you do something out of loyalty or because you’d feel guilty if you didn’t do it. Either way, you end up helping, but autonomous motivation feels better and leads to better outcomes. 

In studies looking at caregiving situations like my friend’s, researchers found that caregivers who had more intrinsic motivation to help their sick partners felt happier, more satisfied with their relationship, and less distressed about caregiving, and were less prone to exhaustion, than those who helped out of a sense of duty. Interestingly, the partner being cared for also seemed to benefit: They were more satisfied with their relationship and, in some cases, felt greater pain relief.

Why would the internal motivations of helpers affect their partners? Sara Kindt, one of the coauthors of these studies, says it has to do with how motivation affects the caregivers’ responsiveness toward their partner.

“Autonomously motivated partners are more open, curious, and sincerely receptive to a partners’ preferences and needs,” she says. “In contrast, a partner’s controlled helping motivation might be associated with reacting in a more restrictive, less responsive way.”

That may be well and good, but isn’t your motivation out of your control? It turns out it’s not—at least not entirely. Instead, it might be possible to nudge it in a more autonomous direction with gratitude.

In a recent study by Kindt and her colleagues, couples—where one member suffered from a painful condition called fibromyalgia and the other was a frequent caregiver—filled out daily questionnaires for two weeks. The caregivers reported on what motivated them to help their partners, whether they thought their partners were grateful, and to what degree helping kept them from fulfilling personal goals that day—like maintaining relationships with others, enjoying leisure time, working, or taking care of their own health.

Researchers found that on days when caregivers perceived more gratitude from their partners, their motivation to help was significantly more autonomous. It was less autonomous when they felt thwarted in fulfilling their goals—probably no surprise there. However, perceiving gratitude also had carryover effects, making caregivers more intrinsically motivated to help the next day, too. Conflicts with personal goals had no such carryover effects.

“Gratitude is a powerful thing,” says Kindt. “Like the title of a paper by Adam Grant suggests, ‘A little thanks goes a long way.’”

How to give and receive

What might this mean for couples going through hard times? According to Kindt, it helps show that preserving a positive relationship during caregiving is important for the well-being of both caregivers and care receivers, and that giving and receiving gratitude could be the glue that helps do that.

Still, it might be hard to feel grateful when you’re in pain or feeling down. My friend suggested that it was difficult for her when she sensed her husband was not anticipating her needs as well as he could or trying to get by doing the minimum.

“It was usually easy to say thank you, and I did tell him I was grateful,” she said. “But I didn’t feel an uncomplicated gratitude. It was more like, ‘Thank you, but I wish it was different.’”

You can’t force gratitude—otherwise, it can feel more like an expression of indebtedness, which does not result in the same benefits as authentic gratitude. And, if other people pick up on our ambivalence, it might be hard for them to accept our gratitude as real.

In these moments, perhaps it would be helpful to recognize our difficult situation and try expressive writing, which can be a good way to explore painful emotions—like disappointment, sadness, or anger—and find more compassion for ourselves and others. Doing so may open the door to more positive emotions—like gratitude.

Gratitude Quiz

Research Insights from Independent Schools Magazine: Improving Teacher Well-Being

In spring 2017, educators across the United States answered these questions as part of the Emotion Revolution for Educators survey, a joint initiative between the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and New Teacher Center, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
   
In the study, we wanted to unpack teachers’ current emotional reality and explore links between educators’ emotional lives and school-related experiences. Using social media and outreach to like-minded organizations such as Edutopia and NAIS, as well as connecting directly with schools, nearly 7,000 educators from across the nation completed the survey. The full survey results will be released in a series of scholarly papers throughout 2018. Here, we compare some initial results from the national sample to approximately 500 teachers recruited from NAIS.
 

How Teachers Feel

First, teachers were asked to describe in their own words the three most frequent emotions they felt each day at school. The top three feelings from the national sample were frustrated, overwhelmed, and stressed, whereas the top three from teachers in the NAIS sample were: frustrated, joyful/happy, and excited. “Frustrated” was by far the most mentioned emotion for all teachers. It appears private school teachers report greater happiness and excitement than teachers who work in public or charter schools. It’s also noteworthy that the private school teachers who participated in this research reported less anxiety-related emotions like stress.
   
We then asked teachers how they want to feel at school. The top three emotions that teachers in the national sample wanted to feel were: happy, appreciated/valued, and supported, whereas the top hoped-for emotions for teachers in the NAIS sample were: joy/joyful, happy, and excited. It appears that teachers in public schools have a greater need for appreciation and support than teachers who work in private schools.
 

Why Teachers’ Emotions Matter

At the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, we study how emotions drive effective teaching and learning, the decisions students and educators make, the quality of teacher-to-student and student-to-student relationships, and both student and educator well-being and school climate. We assert that emotions matter a great deal in school for four primary reasons.
 
Attention, memory, and learning. Joy and excitement harness attention and promote greater engagement. Boredom and stress disrupt concentration and interfere with learning. Chronic stress can result in the persistent activation of the sympathetic nervous system and the release of stress hormones like cortisol. Prolonged release of cortisol impacts brain structures associated with executive functioning and memory.
 
Decision-making. Strong, negative emotions can hijack the brain in ways that make wise decision-making impossible. In contrast, people in pleasant moods tend to evaluate individuals, places, and events more favorably compared with people in unpleasant moods. Pleasant moods also tend to enhance mental flexibility and creativity.
 
Relationships. Emotions are signals about changes in relationships. For example, the emotions that teachers feel each day in class influence teacher-student bond. Teachers who display frustration and anger often alienate students, and that can influence students’ sense of safety and belongingness in the classroom and their ability to learn.
 
Health and well-being. How we feel influences our physical and mental health. Stress, for example, is associated with increased levels of cortisol, which has been shown to lead to weight gain. Positive moods are associated with higher levels of serotonin, which has been shown to curb one’s appetite. Pleasant emotions, in general, provide health benefits, including greater resilience.
   
The good news is that many of the independent school teachers in this study reported experiencing more positive than negative emotions in school. The bad news across private and public school teachers: Everyone is reporting feeling frustration, which when prolonged can lead to stress, poor health, depression, anxiety, disruptive sleep patterns, and decreased focus. These consequences eventually can lead to low performance, increased absenteeism, high turnover, and low student achievement.
 

Closing the Emotion Gap

One important finding across all types of schools in this study is that a healthy school climate—where teachers and parents support one another, teachers and administrators get along well, and teachers care about one another and are committed to their students—correlates positively with teachers’ reports of more positive and fewer negative emotions. Moreover, positive emotions appear to be a protective factor against burnout, including emotional exhaustion, lower turnover intent, mental health problems, sleep problems, and absenteeism.
   
The question now becomes: How can schools create healthy, prosocial climates that will best support teachers to help them become more resilient and thrive? Current research shows that most effective approaches include a focus on building a positive school climate and infusing evidence-based practices to develop teachers’ emotion skills.
   
At the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, we developed RULER (ruler.yale.edu), an evidence-based approach to social-emotional learning (SEL). In validating the effectiveness of RULER, we found that it enhances classroom emotional climate, reduces burnout, and enhances academic achievement. RULER is grounded in emotional intelligence and systems theories and is built upon decades of research showing that the skills associated with recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotion are essential to effective teaching, learning, and leading. Importantly, RULER starts with training adults so they can develop key emotion skills and be role models before infusing practices into the classroom.
   
Coaching is another approach that prevents stress and helps teachers develop strategies for managing it. New Teacher Center’s mentoring and induction model has been found to strengthen relationships and collegiality, resulting in a supportive environment for beginning teachers. Mentors and new teachers discuss challenges such as those related to student behavior and communication with families, often sources of stress for new teachers. Mentors help new teachers establish a prosocial culture, climate, and community in the classroom, which is the very foundation for social and emotional learning. 
             
For teachers to perform at their best and thrive in all aspects of their lives, we need to close the “feelings gap.” Emotions are a power source waiting to be constructively tapped. Fortunately, more and more schools are seeing the benefits of SEL training on educator and student outcomes; more schools of education are starting to integrate preparation in the area; and more policies around SEL are being considered. If we want our teachers and youth to succeed, schools must be places where SEL is integrated into how leaders lead, teachers teach, and students learn.

Check out the entire Independent Magazine: https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/

AUTHOR

Marc A. Brackett

Marc A. Brackett is director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in New Haven, Connecticut. He’s available on Twitter @marcbrackett or via www.ei.yale.edu.

Wendy Baron

Wendy Baron is chief officer of social and emotional learning at New Teacher Center in Santa Cruz, California.