In this episode, Laura Hazlett, PhD student at UCLA discusses her paper “Exploring neural mechanisms of the health benefits of gratitude in women: A randomized controlled trial” published in the journal Brain, Behaviour, and Immunity in 2021. 

Laura explains that this research from the Social and Affective Neuroscience lab at UCLA examined the possible benefits that gratitude may have on health. Past research shows there is a strong relationship between giving behavior and health, so the question for this study was:  “Is it possible that gratitude may benefit health through the same mechanisms as giving to others?”

Laura and her team found that the gratitude intervention didn’t have any direct impact on inflammatory markers. However, people in this study had an increase in giving behaviours, and concluded that “gratitude may benefit health (reducing inflammatory responses) through the … effects of support-giving.” 

Summary→ practicing gratitude was found to increase the subject's likelihood to engage in giving behaviours or support-giving (telling someone you’re grateful for them for example) and that giving of support to others has positive health outcomes including reducing inflammation. 

Show notes: 

Laura Hazlett is a member of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at UCLA: https://sanlab.psych.ucla.edu/overview/ 

You can read Laura’s articles at Google scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Gm3go24AAAAJ&hl=en 

Email: laurahazlett@ucla.edu