A Gratitude Conversation with Lyndsay Ryan

Why Gratitude?

A few years ago, heartbroken and eyeballs deep in despair, I started searching for things for which to be grateful. I asked myself the question asked by poet Katie Farris

“Why write love poetry in a burning world? To train myself, in the midst of a burning world, to offer poems of love to a burning world.”

I reached out to people who — in the way in which they live — write love poems to our burning world. I cast my net far and wide amongst my heroes — those I knew personally and those who teach us all by their example. I invited artists, philosophers, psychologists, politicians, professors, yogis, writers, clergy, and others into a dialogue about gratitude. I am deeply grateful to those who said yes. Read more about my gratitude project methodology here.

Lindsay Ryan

Lindsay Ryan is an Associate Research Scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 from the Pennsylvania State University in Human Development and Family Studies. Dr. Ryan is an investigator on several ongoing research projects, all of which involve an interest in better measuring and understanding the processes by which adults change over the life course. Her research interests include investigating individual and contextual influences on well-being, physical health, and cognition across adulthood, with a particular focus on the impact of social relations.

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A Gratitude Conversation with Lindsay Ryan

KSC — I’m curious about your research agenda, your journey. How did you get to do what you do? Why is this interesting to you?

LR — So it’s actually sort of funny. I went to a small liberal arts college, a state school in New York. I’m from Rochester originally. It was a very good school, it’s called Geneseo. They have great academics. And, you know, I went in as a psychology major thinking that I wanted to become a child psychologist. I basically just was like the psychology geek of the department.

I decided to take as many classes as I could in psychology, because I just loved all different parts of it. And I had taken child and adolescent development, and then I noticed that there was an adult development course, and I thought, well, I might as well just complete the lifespan, let’s take the third one. And within two weeks of classes, it just dawned on me that this is what I really am interested in.

I had this sort of aha moment. I started looking back on my life to that point, and it became very clear that I’ve always been drawn to adults. I realized as a child I would walk to elementary school, because it was very close, it was the 80s, you were allowed to do that. I would be like a third grader just walking to school, and I had this older couple that I would wave to every morning as they were having their breakfast in their house along the way.

I don’t know how it started. They would always look for me, and I would wave, and then on my way home from school they’d be out in their garden and we’d chit chat. I just befriended them, which I don’t know that that’s totally normal for an eight- or nine-year-old, but I loved them. They were great. And then I thought back and realized that the place I worked in high school. It was a chocolate shop, and I was the only student there. I was the only young person there. It was a bunch of middle-aged women. It was a blast. I just loved it.

I took this class and all the pieces sort of fit together. I realized kids are important, but there’s a lot of people studying kids. And so, I decided to just go full on and decide I want to change my focus to studying adults. And then, {they offered} I wanted to do an internship just to get experience. It turned out I was the first person in all the psychology department’s history that ever wanted to find an internship focused on adults.

Which the internship coordinator was horrified that nobody had ever. They didn’t even notice that it had not happened until I asked for it. I just had this moment. I was a sophomore when that happened, so I had enough time left in college to really gear my studies with this new sort of focus. I realize most undergrads don’t go in sort of having this specific idea.

I was very fortunate. I worked very hard, it wasn’t just all luck, but I got into a very good program for graduate school at Penn State. I was able to really expand on these interests. In general, when I describe my work, the general unifying theme is that it has an interest in aging, in adulthood, and the ways in which people do this more successfully than others, and what is it that leads people on these different pathways.

You know, within that, there’s all sorts of different areas, whether it’s physical health, well-being, looking at relationships, which obviously then links into gratitude, all these pieces can be linked to gratitude in different ways, which is actually a pretty new area for me.

KSC — In thinking about what it means to learn gratitude. Can we, do we only build gratitude muscles as children, when we’re told to say thank you when someone gives you something. Can we come to gratitude in a different way?

Does gratitude mean different things as we age? That’s really part of what my interest was. Does the experience, is the experience of gratitude qualitatively different? Or is it the same? Do people feel it in the same ways? Are there some sorts of events that trigger it as we age? I suspect it’s probably not for that latter question. What have you found around that? What are your suppositions? What are your inklings?

LR — I was very fortunate. My expertise these days is in survey research, survey design, which is a totally different world than I was in as a grad student. I have experience developing measures to analyze difference and capture different phenomena. I’m not even sure how I happened upon the gratitude literature, to be honest.

I do a lot of work looking at couples and relationships. There’s interesting work showing that gratitude is really important for building and maintaining pro-social behavior and healthy relationships. And as I was reading this, I realized that this is almost all based on undergraduates. At universities, there are these examples. All of these extrapolations about how gratitude affects behavior and feelings is based on undergraduate relationships.

And in my world, I’m thinking about the young people in their 50s. And these marriages are long-term marriages. I found myself wondering, do these relationships hold in the same way? I put in a proposal to the Templeton Foundation to basically look, to do some qualitative work with older adults, to see if they talk about gratitude in ways that aligned with this earlier research and see if there’s anything else that they have to say about it that I hadn’t seen in the literature. And then from that, start to work on new ways to measure it that’s maybe more appropriate for older adults than some of the existing measures. We did focus groups with people in their 60s, their 70s, and their 80s, which were just fascinating.

KSC — Oh, Wow!

LR — Yeah, it was, I loved it. All of this started since I’ve been at the University of Michigan. This is probably like 2016. I mean, I was shocked that I got the funding because I had no publication record in gratitude at all, but I have a strong record in studying older adults and in measurement design. Somehow, Templeton gave me a chance. An exciting day when that happened.

KSC — That sounds fascinating. You developed interview protocols around gratitude? Did you base those protocols on any previous, on any of those undergraduate protocols? Did you see interesting things to model? Or did you build all of it?

LR — We built what we called moderator guides. Our first step was obviously doing the literature review. And there were maybe two or three papers that focused on older adults, but the vast majority are kids, really.

KSC — I haven’t seen anything like what you’re talking about, so that’s fascinating.

LR — Still very few, even these years later. And so, you know, I read through as much of the literature as I could and used that as sort of talking points for the moderator to go through in these focus groups.

But really, you know, when developing surveys, you wanna know what language, what are the words people use, so that when you’re writing questions, it’s the right terms. You know, we might have an idea of what you think, how you should describe some sort of phenomena, but if it makes no sense to an actual person, it’s not useful. And you’re not gonna get the information you want.

KSC — Exactly.

LR — Good measurement is very, very difficult. I don’t think people appreciate that enough. It’s not really a jazzy topic, but it’s very important. And, so these focus groups were just really fascinating.

Again, we based the initial discussions on what we thought would probably be important, but we also asked some things like, you know, compared to when you were a younger adult, you know, do you think you tend to be more grateful now than you were? And virtually everybody said yes, which I think sort of goes to your learning question.

KSC — Right. And again, is it just experience?

LR — You know, one of the things, especially when thinking about older adults, is that gratitude is often in response to somebody helping you. And as you age, there are often more negative events. So, you have more social losses. This is particularly for the oldest, 80 plus. They’re losing spouses. They’re losing siblings. There are fewer and fewer people of their cohort even just left.

You have some physical losses, all these sorts of things. And it’s often in response to these losses that you receive help for which you then might feel grateful. And so, you know, it could be that it’s a normative process that, you know, we don’t have longitudinal data, so I can’t say it’s actually going up over time.

But every person said that they’re more grateful now than they used to be, virtually every person we talked to. And it could just be that, you know, with experience they learn and they’re better at it. Or it could be that it has to happen for most people because as you age, you have more reasons to be grateful.

You have more opportunity and exposure to events and things that produce gratitude. I would say definitely people, I would argue people could learn for sure. What’s driving why they’re learning I think is an open question.

KSC — Something that keeps coming up is the difference between being grateful to someone or something and being grateful for someone or something? What does that make you think about, that distinction?

LR — So this was something that was really just sort of making my brain explode at this meeting that I went to. And I just thought that that was the, one of the speakers there framed it that way, grateful to versus grateful for. And there are some purists that I’ve met now who really argue that gratitude can only be in response to an action from a benefactor. So that’s grateful to. So many people say that’s gratitude. Gratitude is if you’re grateful to a person.

Grateful for, such as grateful for my health or grateful for that beautiful sunset is some would say appreciation, but that’s not right. Now, novice me going into this gratitude work, I didn’t have any appreciation for this nuance. And I really feel like I started to understand it, at least the arguments for the two different compartmentalizations at this meeting.

I’m on the fence. I think that in terms of what the data show is that there are definite [factors]. If you think of like a factor model, they’re two separate factors, right? Now, it’s possible that there’s an overall construct that is driving both grateful to and grateful for. Some super construct general gratitude that’s related to both of these things.

And I think because so much of what older adults are grateful about, at least in their own language, are grateful for, they’re grateful for still, because many of them have, it’s this idea of limited time. They know that if you’re in your 70s, you don’t have decades and decades left for the most part. And that makes people grateful for more things.

If grateful to is the only thing that counts, then I think we’re missing a big piece of the experience for older adults. And I just don’t know that there’s enough research that differentiates the two to know if they’re truly distinct things and if only one matters. Now, I would say the grateful to, so you’re grateful for something somebody did for you.

Clearly, that’s the one that is going to be more relevant for pro-social behavior and relationships. At least there’s a much more obvious direct link there because somebody does something for you, you’re mindful of it and you feel grateful, and then you then do something in return, whether it’s immediately or at some other point. Those are those specific feelings and behaviors that keep social ties strong.

And I think there’s a lot of evidence for that. It doesn’t mean I don’t think, at least in my opinion, that feeling grateful for things, which is sort of a general positivity and being mindful and being aware, also doesn’t have benefits for social relationships and social ties. I think there could be a link there, but I think it’s more tenuous than the first. If that makes sense? But yeah, there’s quite a debate. And a lot of people, I mean, my mind was sort of blown listening to this.

And a lot of the gratitude instruments out there actually are measuring grateful for. So, the purists would say that we need to really not conflate these two pieces. That grateful for is important because that’s what a lot of these studies are using.

Coming from a research background, I think it’s important to see if these two really are distinct. And to understand, if they are, do they have different pathways in the ways in which they’re affecting important health and well-being outcomes? If you’re looking at particular outcomes and impacts, what particular aspects of gratitude lead to, what are those elements of gratitude that are so valuable, if there are any? Right. And if we don’t disentangle these two pieces, I don’t know that we can answer that.

At least that’s the message I took out from this wonderful meeting. And when you think about particular things like the relationship between gratitude and depression, or the relationship between gratitude and anxiety, or the relationship between gratitude and community, you have to define the term.

You have to really look at what it is and figure out what’s happening in the situation. And I can see, related to that idea, really, that the grateful to, so linked to people, that would obviously have strong impacts for community, right? But something like depression, grateful for, might be just as important, because it’s helping you see outside whatever dark lenses you’re currently looking through. Depending on the outcome, I think the definition really could operate in different ways.

KSC — This conversation has given me all sorts of interesting ideas. Your data must be fascinating. The group that you were talking to. The things you were looking for. You probably found out all kinds of information about prosocial behaviors, community development, and even like quality of life and well-being.

LR — My work before thinking about gratitude has been focused on well-being, mental health, and physical health as well. A lot of what we examined and talked about were related to those domains. I would say the two themes that came out of the focus group work that I hadn’t thought about, but that made a lot of sense. One was this idea of what’s called future time perspective, which is this sense that you have limited time, and how people who have a stronger perception of that are the ones who are saying, I’m just so grateful every spring when I get to see another crop of daisies come out of the ground [for, example].

So, the importance of future time on feeling gratitude made a lot of sense. And since then, there’s been one or two papers thinking about and talking about this as well. 

And the other piece that surprised me, but it shouldn’t have knowing my background in the aging literature, was that especially for the oldest old, those in their 80s and up, feelings of gratitude were not just purely positive. It became interesting because one of the big themes in the adult and aging literature is that as you get older, there are a lot of fears about losing control and [the ability] to make your own decisions. You know, there’s my grandmother, her recurring nightmare is that her kids, her adult children in their 60s now, come over to her house and rearrange everything without her permission. This is what her nightmares are. It’s actually very thematic.

I mean, older adults want to make their own decisions and do their own things, have a feeling of efficacy. And typically, you feel grateful when people help you. These people feel threats to their efficacy. These instances of helping may create senses of gratitude and feelings of gratitude, but also resentment. And so that was something very unique. 

And at the meeting, I was talking about this. And one of the other researchers, he piped up and said, you know, I can see this in my kids. You know, you do something to help your child and they yell, I want to do that myself. And, you know, I don’t know that the child was feeling mixed emotion, gratitude, and negative emotion, but again, it’s an age group where they want to prove their own efficacy. So again, that was also something that I hadn’t thought about, but this sort of mixed emotional experience was not uncommon in these, especially the oldest adults.

That was interesting. It has implications for whether we make recommendations about just always do everything you can to be helpful, because in some instances it might backfire. If you’re trying to build close relationships with neighbors, you know, for some people that might actually help, but others, they might actually resent it, even though they understand it was well-intended. But that was actually very interesting.

KSC — That’s fascinating for several reasons. Number one, it makes me think of one of the things that keeps coming up in this work. 

Story, the idea of knowing each other’s stories, and the value of being grateful for knowing our stories. You knowing my story. My knowing your story. We can enter gratitude in a much more reciprocal. It’s much more possible to be grateful in a situation where we know each other’s stories. And I’m just thinking, if the folks who hold the doors knew the story. If we could create a world where [everyone knows our stories]. Does that resonate with you at all?

LR — It does. I’m sure there’s certain sorts of helping. If you know that this one person. That she does this one thing for herself, even though you could do it faster, and even though you just wanted to be helpful, if you know that it’s something that’s really important for them to do themselves, you probably wouldn’t do it, and then everybody’s happy. She gets a sense of accomplishment and efficacy for doing this thing, and you don’t pose a threat to that. When you have more context about an individual, you know the other places in which it would definitely be welcomed to help in some way or another.

KSC — And in learning their story, you validated their experience.

LR — Oh, yes. Yeah, when you can show, especially patterns over time, a lot of my work is focused on longitudinal data and understanding how things change and why they change. And if you’re in a relationship where you figure out, yes, I’m gonna be sensitive to this issue, when you show a pattern over time of being sensitive to it and just, you know, appreciating their perspective, that also is going to, you know, help with social ties and connectedness. I don’t know that I’ve seen that work within a framework of gratitude, but that’d be very interesting.

KSC — It’s one of the things that the idea of story has come up in probably 90 percent of my conversations even before I started asking specifically about story. It’s the idea that when we know our stories grateful living is more possible, but also when we know other stories, other people’s stories.

LR — I come from an individual differences background, so everybody experiences things in slightly different ways and, or they have, there’s a reason why they’re affected by this, but maybe not that. That it’s a very, a nuanced perspective is always gonna give better results.

And I would think it’s probably even more important with adults, because adults, now you know you’re supposed to say thank you, or you know where it’s not just a kind of quid pro quo, good manners type thing. With adults it’s different. It’s a little different.

KSC — I’m curious about your thoughts about the notion of being grateful for both good and bad. Truly finding gratitude in happy moments, in things that are easy to understand, things easily wrapped in gratitude versus that fullness of experience. I’m wondering if adults, if you have found that there’s an appreciation for gratitude around failure, or gratitude around loss.

LR — Well this all plays into why older adults tend to be higher because they have opportunities to have had these low points. Just being grateful for being alive, having recovered from cancer or stroke, or losing a spouse, it makes you potentially just more grateful for the time that you had with them before they were gone. If you want to think of these losses as opportunities that sort of add up over time. If they’re mindful of these things and the perspective that maybe it’s given them, it really does enhance the opportunity for them to appreciate and be grateful.

There were definitely people who would mention having gone through a serious hardship, but they were grateful because it produced a new relationship that they didn’t have before. Sometimes it’s with the nurses at hospital. If they’re getting chemo treatments, they develop these important bonds. Even in the face of something very difficult, there was this positive thing that came out of it.

I think there’s certain losses that maybe are more difficult to reach that perspective. The other issue is once you get to those that are 80 plus, these are the survivors. We also have the question about, some people didn’t make it that long, and we have selection processes that are working in the background. Perhaps these people were more grateful all along, and that’s one of the reasons they survived longer.

This is why we really need to look at people over time to get a sense of what is driving what. I suspect it’s a combination of both, that those who are higher in gratitude, more mindful, are going to be healthier and have better relationships, which we know is important for physical health, but that also, it probably does increase over time, given all these various opportunities that crop up to feel grateful for a variety of different reasons. I don’t know if I’ve gotten away from the original question.

KSC — What comes to me right now in thinking about the connection between well-being, mindfulness, and gratitude as we get older? Is there a relationship between a healthy well-being and quality of life and gratitude? Do you think there is a relationship?

LR — So, what do you mean by quality of life?

KSC — I was thinking the basics. If we are more independent when we get older, are we more grateful? Are there connections around things that create, a gratitude practice or mindfulness practice, and gratitude?

LR — I think more autonomous [people] tend to, who are bigger into keeping their own sense of autonomy, are less interested in gratitude in general, and experience less gratitude. But in terms of independent living, and just having a healthy sort of life, there’s definitely plenty of work to show that gratitude is related to subjective well-being, so measures of life satisfaction. It’s highly due to positive affect, associated with lower negative affect, different ways of measuring well-being.

Another component of the literature for older adults is the huge importance of social relationships. It’s one of the most important factors in successful aging, and in buffering against stress and health issues. Having strong social ties, it’s something that older adults prioritize more than younger adults.

They’re more willing to give up hobbies if it takes time away from family, that sort of thing. They really put a strong focus on the social connections that are important to them. And part of that is because of this idea that they have limited time, so they want focus on the things that give them the most pleasure, and typically that’s social relationships and family.

All the background showing that the experience, the process of gratitude, makes these connections stronger. They have to be connected. It’s certainly an integral piece that frankly hasn’t really been explored in the aging literature, and really should be. There’s just endless number of papers indicating the implications of having strong social connections with mortality, dealing with disability, cognitive functioning. It’s implicated in pretty much any sort of health outcome you can imagine.

And nobody is really looking at gratitude in the aging world. I think they’re definitely related and the pathways are actually going to be very interesting if we’re able to. One of my ultimate goals was to come up with a short sort of survey instrument.

I work on big, large population studies here at the center, and it’d be really great if we could get some of this data in, because right now the big study I work on, to my knowledge, doesn’t have any sort of gratitude indicators in it. And it would be really interesting to get some of that so that we could track how people change over time. They have to be related.

I would just be completely shocked if the data didn’t show that. And I know that the cross-sectional data I have shows that all these pieces are indeed linked and significantly related to each other.

KSC — Where do you see your focus groups going? You conducted your focus groups to develop instruments, and then those instruments will look more deeply. What are your major research questions and where do you see that going?

LR — We used that to come up with the constructs and the sort of areas that we thought were going to be important to hit on in our survey instrument. And part of the project from Templeton funded us to come up with a pool of sample items.

I did a small survey that asked a respondent group of the 50 plus. I think our sample ranged from 50 to 91, and about 100 people did this. [I asked our participants] to answer our pool of questions, which are currently being analyzed to figure out the psychometrics. And then we also had them then do a lot of questions that are typical in surveys about health as well as personality.

We got some subjective well-being items, so that we can differentiate. Is it just general positivity or is it actually something specific about gratitude? And then we also had them do our questionnaire two weeks later, so that we could look at test, retest, again, just for psychometric reasons.

The goal is to have maybe like a three-facet scale that could be done in less than a minute because in the survey world, the length of time it takes people to answer, the more expensive it is to administer. [We] have a short instrument that maybe captures three different domains that have pretty good measurement properties. That’s the end game for this project. To have a new scale.

KSC — What is the overarching research question for the project?

LR — The overarching aim was to really understand gratitude in an aging society because we’re going to have more older adults than we’ve ever had in history. And this is happening all around the world, obviously. I wanted to know, do they experience it differently? Are we missing anything related to gratitude and the experience of gratitude? Are we missing anything with the current measures that we had in the literature? And if so, what are we missing and how do we capture that in a new measure? That was really the goal.

To understand what is their experience of gratitude and what do we need to do to really measure this well? That was sort of the ultimate aim of the study. Whether the sample of items that we’ve collected captures all of this? I’m sure it doesn’t, but I think hopefully it’s a step in the right direction. Related to that, the sort of other goal is to just get people thinking about gratitude in this population because I think it’s highly relevant. And if we can have people with better relationships and better health, it’s good for everybody. It’s good for society. It’s good for public health. It’s good for individuals and families and relationships.

KSC — Is there a connection between gratitude and service?

LR — That is interesting. Thinking about volunteerism for example. Those people who say when you retire, this is your opportunity. Basically, what the data shows are that the people who volunteer after retirement are the ones who are volunteering before retirement. Because part of the conversations that I had was the sense of paying it forward. That came up a lot. This sense that feeling grateful if a stranger does something and maybe they’re not there to thank you.

You know, the whole, somebody buys my coffee in front of line at Starbucks. So, and this concept of not only just, you know, reciprocating to a specific person, but just paying it forward because you’re grateful that this thing happened. That certainly would have thematic ties to service and volunteerism.

But for the life of me, I can’t think of a paper that has tried to look at trait levels. Because people think of gratitude as a state as well as a trait, sort of a personality. And that would actually be super interesting to look at trait gratitude and whether it predicted service.

The paper could be out there, but I haven’t seen it. But it makes a real, very logical connection. If you can come up with ways to try to get people to be more grateful in general, would that then provide a service to society? That would be interesting. I could see the link. Is it a chicken and egg thing? If we’re grateful, do we serve? Do we serve and does that make us grateful?

It could be either. And it could be that they reinforce each other. There must be something to get you to serve in the first place. It could be, and the reason I mentioned that the people who serve are the ones that continue to do it, there isn’t a lot of change. It could be these people that are just higher in gratitude in general.

It’s a stable sort of trait, like it’s a behavior linked to this stable trait over time. It could be that parents really valued this and they got them doing it at an early age. Or, you know, at church or whatever, whatever sort of avenue in which they’re doing service, but you have to have some sort of catalyst to start. I would say if they start on their own choice, then I could see that there’s got to be some reason they want do it. And gratitude, wanting to pay it forward, wanting to be generative, would make a really compelling pathway for that. I have a big interest in that with these retiring boomers.

KSC — It sounds like there might be some misconceptions. It sounds like you just pointed to people. Well of course they’re going to retire. We are going to have all these retirements. We are going to have this volunteer workforce. All these people that are going to be able to do things. And that might not be the case.

LR — They might not want to. What we’ve seen is people who volunteer in retirement are the ones who are already doing it. So, the goal is getting people started earlier. And maybe gratitude is a pathway to get them to feel that they want to contribute. Gratitude is reciprocating and service is a way to do it.