THE SCIENCE OF GRATITUDE

Abstract

Gratitude is the art of noticing and reflecting upon what we are thankful for. Gratitude has been a moral virtue for centuries. It has been practiced and encouraged across the realm of time and space across religions and cultures. Gratitude is treated as a positive psychological phenomenon that alters our affective states by modulating the neural activity in the brain. In this review, we have described several studies on the psychosocial effects of gratitude expression, the underlying neural underpinnings of gratitude, and the effect of the expression of gratitude on the individual brain. This will help us understand the psychosocial effects of gratitude expression and its neural basis and further the role of Gratitude-based methods as interventions under the positive psychology field to overcome mental health problems in our society.