What a Weekly List of Five Things Changed in a 2003 Gratitude Experiment, and What It Left Alone

Among the things students listed as worth being grateful for in Emmons and McCullough’s 2003 experiment were “waking up this morning” and “to the Rolling Stones.” The hassles list included “hard to find parking” and “messy kitchen no one will clean.” Those two columns of ordinary complaints and ordinary thanks are the whole intervention.

Does counting blessings improve how you feel? In the three experiments reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2003, 84(2), 377-389), people who listed up to five things they were grateful for felt better than people who listed hassles, and sometimes better than people who listed neutral events or did nothing. It also failed to move several outcomes, and the biggest gap in the paper is against the hassles group, which is the weakest rival you could pick.

I read the full paper, not just the abstract.

What the three studies did

Study	Who	Conditions	Length
1	192 undergraduates analysed (201 enrolled)	Gratitude list, hassles list, neutral events list	Weekly forms, nine analysed
2	157 undergraduates analysed (166 enrolled)	Gratitude, hassles, downward social comparison	Daily forms, 13 days analysed
3	65 adults with neuromuscular disease, ages 22 to 77	Gratitude list, or ratings only	21 days

In Study 1 the weekly form asked for up to five things to be grateful for over the past week. The hassles group listed up to five irritants from “today.” The events group listed five events that affected them that week. The list came last on the form, after the mood ratings, so it could not colour them. Students were doing this for a health psychology class, which matters later.

What changed

In Study 1, the gratitude group rated their lives more favourably and was more optimistic about the coming week than both other groups, and reported fewer physical symptoms (3.03 against 3.54 for hassles and 3.75 for events). They also reported about 4.35 hours of exercise a week against 3.01 in the hassles group. The events group sat in between at 3.74 and did not differ from either.

In Study 2, the daily version, the gratitude group reported higher positive affect than the hassles group (0.24 against -0.26 on a standardised factor). The gratitude-versus-hassles effect on felt gratitude was d = 0.88, up from d = 0.56 in the weekly study. The authors read this as evidence that daily is more potent than weekly, though the samples differed, so treat the comparison loosely.

Study 3 was the strongest result. Against a control that only filled in ratings, the gratitude group had higher positive affect (d = 0.56), lower negative affect (d = -0.51), and felt more connected to other people. Spouses and partners, asked to answer as they thought the participant would, rated the gratitude group higher on life satisfaction (4.42 against 3.63, p < .02). On sleep, the gratitude group averaged 7.58 hours against 7.06.

What didn’t

Positive and negative mood did not differ between groups in Study 1. In Study 2 the downward social comparison group landed between the other two and could not be separated statistically from either. Study 2 found no differences in physical symptoms, exercise, sleep amount, or sleep quality. Study 3 found no difference in pain, pain interference, exercise, or ability to carry out daily tasks.

The authors said so themselves: “Unfortunately, not all findings replicated across the three studies.” They suspected two to three weeks was too short to change exercise habits, but that is a guess. They also wrote that they did not know how long any effect lasts.

What later reviews did with it

Wood, Froh and Geraghty (Clinical Psychology Review, 2010) read this paper’s design critically. Hassles lists are common in gratitude research, they noted, and where studies pair a hassles group with a neutral one, gratitude lists tended to beat the hassles list on certain aspects of well-being but not the other control. They called the portrayal of gratitude interventions as a success of positive psychology “somewhat premature.” They also pointed out that these studies could only detect medium to large effects, so a non-significant gap is not proof of nothing.

The Davis et al. meta-analysis (Journal of Counseling Psychology, 2016), which I know only through a 2024 Psychology & Health paper that summarised it, found small well-being gains against measurement-only controls and against alternative activities, and recommended tempering enthusiasm until longer, stronger interventions showed more. The 2003 data are consistent with that picture: a small, reliable lift in how people rate their mood, strongest against complaining.

One more limit: nearly all of it is self-report, from students who handed forms to their instructor each Monday.

A cheap way to try it

The paper gives you the format: a prompt, five lines, written by hand or in a notes app. Everything below that line is my reasoning, not a finding.

The studies collected daily forms in the evening, so a morning list is an adaptation. I still think the first five minutes after the alarm is a good place to attach it, because that window already has a fixed starting point. If a small act follows something you do every day, you don’t have to decide when to do it. Twyla Tharp’s cab ritual makes the same point about the first act of the day, and research on habits tied to places suggests the cue matters more than the resolve. Writing the plan as “after I’m up, I write five lines” is the format implementation-intention research tests.

Keep your expectations in line with the data. A short list may nudge your mood up a little for the weeks you do it. It won’t make a bad stretch of life feel fixed.

A habit is easier to keep when someone else can see you doing it. DontSnooze rests on that idea for the wake-up itself, and the list can sit in the minutes right after you’ve shown you’re up. If you want a morning reason that pulls rather than pushes, the information-gap theory of curiosity is the other cheap tool.