Expert in dankbaarheid | Levenslooppsycholoog | Docent | Auteur
Lezen is een ontspannende bezigheid en het neemt je mee in werelden die je nooit zou hebben gekend en soms leer ik nieuwe dingen. Ik lees om te ontsnappen uit de realiteit, een andere wereld binnen te gaan, om even lekker lachen of om mee te kijken in het leven van iemand anders. Voor mij is lezen een uitlaatklep en in dit bericht deel ik mijn top 10!
Gratitude is an emotion that arises when people realize that they have received something from someone else they needed. In this crisis, we see how hard the health care people, among others, are working to manage the influx of critically ill and contagious people, even at the risk of becoming ill themselves. We now collectively realize that our society urgently needs these people and their expertise in caring for ourselves and our loved ones.
Many people in our society would like to express their gratitude. We want to let the other know that their commitment, their sacrifice, is appreciated. For example, last Tuesday in the Netherlands, we massively clapped for our people in healthcare. That is a very creative way to show gratitude. It is in our nature to show our appreciation in a creative way. This also applies to the gardeners who now have beautiful flowers that are not going to the Vatican and that they would otherwise have to throw away. How nice is it if you can make other people happy to show your appreciation for their efforts?
How come we suddenly see so much gratitude in our society? Gratitude, like all other emotions, is contagious. When we see someone happy or sad, our mirror neurons ensure that we experience the same emotion. Because someone else expresses gratitude for the people in health care, other people also realize that these people give our society something that we really need. As a result, gratitude spreads like ripples in the water in our society.
So, if we feel grateful for someone who has done something for us, we would like to give something back. Gratitude motivates and activates. We want to do something for the person who helped us, but that does not necessarily have to be aimed at this particular person. When we feel gratitude, it is also possible that we want to do something for someone completely different. We see that people in health care work hard and then therefore there are people who want to look after their children. But we also see other initiatives to support people at risk of being ignored, just as the people in health care support our sick.
Let’s continue with these great actions! Let gratitude flow through our society through beautiful initiatives for appreciation and support for those people who need it most now. And once again from me, many thanks to everyone who is helping to keep our society running in this time of crisis. If you find stories about gratitude inspiring, my book (in Dutch) can be ordered until April 6 with a discount AND signature through my website www.lilianjansbeken.nl.
Op dit moment zien we veel acties om mensen in de zorg en andere belangrijke branches een hart onder de riem te steken. Ondernemers die producten over hebben, geven dit aan ouderen, kwetsbaren of mensen in de zorg. Anderen geven hun tijd om mensen te helpen met kinderoppas, boodschappen doen en honden uitlaten. Al deze acties ontstaan voor een deel vanwege onze dankbaarheid die we allemaal voelen in deze crisistijd.
Ik mag bekend maken dat ik, namens het Thriving Human Science Center, ben uitgenodigd om een volledig voorstel in te dienen voor een subsidie voor een onderzoek naar Dankbaarheid jegens God !
The John Templeton Foundation granted the Biola University with almost $4,000,000 to further the study of Gratitude to God. The Gratitude to God project intents to employ conceptual and empirical methods to investigate the nature of Gratitude to God and to grasp its differences and relations compared to person-to-person gratitude, and more broadly, to illuminate the nature of a fundamental affective process within the psychology of religion. Dr. Lilian Jans-Beken submitted a letter of intent to this project in collaboration with dr. Paul T.P. Wong, and she received word that she is invited to submit a full proposal to the project.
The research question that is presented in the proposal Mature gratitude based on the transformation of suffering is threefold. First, with the proposed study we want to look further into two dimensions – horizontal and vertical – of mature gratitude. We propose that the vertical dimension includes Gratitude to God. Second, we want to look into the proximal virtues of mature gratitude to determine other virtues important to mature gratitude to cultivate. Third, we want to conduct an experiment to see whether a writing intervention can contribute to cultivating mature gratitude.
We congratulate dr. Lilian Jans-Beken with this succes and wish her all the best with the next submission!
“Be patient!” or “patience is a virtue”. Who has never heard this? But what is patience exactly? Patience during an adversity means being able to wait calmly for a bigger reward in the future than someone would receive at that moment. A patient person tolerates or can bear an unpleasant situation until better times come. This requires self-control and is also referred to as deferred gratification.
Three forms of patience are mentioned within psychology. The first form is interpersonal patience. This is a calm reaction to other people that we actually find difficult, unpleasant or frustrating. The second form is patience in case of adversity. This is the calm response to and tolerating serious setbacks in life. Think of having a chronic or life-threatening illness or serious financial problems. The third form is patience for daily frustrations. This is a calm response to daily frustrations such as traffic jams or the long line at the checkout. All three forms of patience mean that people respond to a situation that they consider a setback.
Research shows that just having a character strength is not enough to use it effectively. To be able to use a character strength in daily life, such as patience, it is necessary to form a narrative in which experiencing setback acquires meaning or explanation. This means that people tell a story about themselves and what happened to them to shape their identity. In the case of patience, people tell themselves to stay calm by regulating their emotion and attach meaning to the adversity or person they are dealing with.
Although scientific research into patience is still very scarce, a few things are known about the subject. It appears that having patience is related to psychological well-being in the longer term. It also appears that patient people achieve their goals better than impatient people. Patient people accept setbacks and frustrations on their way to their goal. They continue to make more effort and do not drop out. They do something less often at an incorrect or unfavorable moment but are able to wait until the right moment arrives to act.
Being patient can help you deal with life more resiliently. Fortunately, you can practice being more patient:
1. Accept that you are impatient. Tell yourself that you understand that you are impatient, but that if you will wait for a while it will all be okay.
2. Be aware of the things you cannot control. By surrendering to such situations or people you feel much calmer.
3. Take a deep breath. By taking a deep breath, you activate the nervous system to calm down and restore your bodily stress reaction. It gives you room to think clearly again.
Good luck with these tips to become more patient and have faith because it will all be alright in the end.
De sterke kanten van Peterson en Seligman (2004) zijn persoonlijke kenmerken zoals leiderschap en doorzettingsvermogen. Er is ook kritiek op deze verzameling. Het overgrote gedeelte van deze sterke kanten zijn verbonden aan gedachten, gevoelens en gedrag die ons aanzetten om tegenslag te vermijden. Vanuit de positieve psychologie 2.0 zijn er onderzoekers die bijvoorbeeld ook geduld naar voren schuiven als een sterke kant die ons kan helpen om met tegenslag om te gaan zonder voor de problemen weg te lopen.
Als expert in dankbaarheid vragen mensen me soms of je religieus of spiritueel moet zijn om dankbaar te zijn. Deze veronderstelling is heel begrijpelijk omdat alle religies en belangrijke levensbeschouwingen dankbaarheid als een kerndeugd beschouwen. Onderzoek toont aan dat religieuze of spirituele mensen hogere niveaus van dispositionele dankbaarheid melden dan mensen die zeggen dat ze niet spiritueel of religieus zijn. Om deze vraag te beantwoorden, moeten we kijken naar wat de wetenschap zegt over de oorsprong van spiritualiteit van mensen. Hoe evolueerde spiritualiteit en hoe is het geassocieerd met dankbaarheid?
As an expert in gratitude, people sometimes ask me if you have to be religious or spiritual to be thankful. This assumption is very understandable because all religions and major worldviews regard gratitude as a core virtue. Research shows that religious or spiritual people report higher levels of dispositional gratitude than people who say they are not spiritual or religious. To answer this question, we need to look at what science says about the origin of people’s spirituality. How did spirituality evolve and how is it associated with gratitude?
One component of the scientific study of spirituality is cognitive evolutionary science. It is an approach that assumes that the mind is not just a blank slate that can have anything written on it but that it is shaped by evolution to have a certain structure that expects a specific type of information coming in. When we look at spiritual thought and behavior from a cognitive evolutionary scientific perspective, we can see how spiritual thought and behavior may be a byproduct of tendencies that evolved for other purposes. This is called the byproduct hypothesis.
This byproduct hypothesis considers spiritual thought and behavior a mistake. Humans have cognitive tendencies that evolved for other purposes and they just happened to kick off spiritual belief as a side product. It’s an overfiring of certain cognitive tendencies that we have. It doesn’t seem to have any adaptive function, and it is therefore really puzzling in terms of the payoff structure. But the reason it exists is because of the original cognitive function that pays for itself. The cognitive function evolved because it does some important work in, for instance, in danger perception, but it then overfires and produces spiritual beliefs.
An example of this is called apophenia; the human tendency to connect a subjective experience as something recognizable to a specific meaning to them that is incorrect. This stems from the principles of evolutionary psychology that our minds are not built for accuracy or truth or to provide us with an accurate representation of the world, but they are built for survival. Our brain does all kinds of pre-processing of sensory information that comes into our sensory organs before we have a subjective experience, such that by the time we have that experience, let alone the interpretation of that sensory information, it is already been translated into something that best serves our goals of reproduction and survival.
For survival it is important to see agents when there are actually none, instead of missing agents that are actually there. Evolution would guide the system that is inclined to make the least costly of those two errors. Imagine there is someone walking through a savannah and hears some grass rustle. Now, what is the more costly of the two errors? To assume that that was a predator when there isn’t one? Or to assume that there’s nothing there when it actually was a predator? Clearly, the less dangerous thing is to make the error of over-detection; assuming that there’s something there when there isn’t. The cost of that is that you just unnecessarily engaged the fear response. But the cost of the error of under-detection, where you’re missing the predator that’s actually there, is that you become diner. This is why humans see random agents with minds in nature. We all have seen faces and animals in clouds, stars, food, or photos.
Justin Barrett has called this the hyperactive agency detection device, and he and Stewart Guthrie and others have made the point that this tendency to over-perceive agency likely underlies our tendency to infer gods and spirits in the natural world. Especially in the absence of a scientific explanation for things like the wind and the tides, and the rising of the sun and the moon, the human mind would have immediately inferred supernatural agency behind these natural events. This is, among other theories, why wind spirits and sun gods were born in our pre-history.
Thus, the hyperactive agency detection device is rooted in the byproduct hypothesis. With the byproduct hypothesis, which suggests that spiritual beliefs are the consequences of evolved genetic adaptations that we have for different reasons. They were adaptations that served their own purposes in human survival. But as a byproduct, they lead to spiritual thinking. In other words, our ancestors weren’t selected because they believed in gods. They were selected because they could perceive agency and purpose in an environment that was full of active and plotting minds. The fact that such a system also led them to perceive active and plotting gods was just an accident.
Now back to gratitude. As we have seen above, humans perceive supernatural gods, spirits, and ancestors in their environment and they mistakenly connect them with the danger or abundance in their life. These gods, spirits, and ancestors are considered to be responsible for adversity or prosperity. Already the prehistoric humans made offers to propitiate gods, spirits, and ancestors. They also made thanks-offerings because they had a good hunt, or they could harvest enough crops to feed their families and tribes. Thanking a supernatural or non-existing being has become part and parcel of the human spiritual dimension, also called the vertical dimension.
New research by Jans-Beken and Wong is looking into existential gratitude or mature gratitude. This concept includes both a horizontal and a vertical dimension (see diagram below). The horizontal immanent dimension includes gratitude for prosperity and adversity of the world that is conceived consciously and within earthly borders. It is directed at materialistic and naturalistic things, expected and unexpected events, and the people with whom we interact
The vertical transcendental dimension of gratitude can assist in experiencing the horizontal dimension of gratitude. This transcendental dimension is the experience of gratitude for phenomena that cannot be precisely and mentally located in space and time. Illustrations of this vertical gratitude are cosmic gratitude, gratitude to God, or spiritual gratitude that can be elicited by, for example, gratitude for ancestors or spirits, but also an awareness of being part of something big.
When talking to people about gratitude in times of adversity, most of them tell about this vertical dimension. Not everybody mentions God explicitly, but most of the people I interviewed for my book talked about the feeling of being part of something bigger than themselves or something between “heaven and earth” that decided it wasn’t their time yet. It seems to be comforting to direct gratitude to something big and kind to cope with suffering. So, is it necessary to be religious or spiritual to experience gratitude? I assume it is possible to feel grateful for earthly things, but a sense of a vertical dimension can deepen, intensify and strengthen the feeling of gratitude. My future research should shed light on this assumption so keep following me!
With great thanks to the EdX course The Science of Religion by The University of British Columbia.
People in our environment have the tendency to tell us what our weaknesses are, and what we need to improve ourselves. However, often we already know what our faults are, and such a conversation gives us an unpleasant and uneasy feeling. Science says that it is therefore a good idea to talk about our virtues and character strengths instead of our weaknesses.
Virtues and character strengths are an expression of personal characteristics or personality that are considered moral goodness. This means that virtues and character strengths help people to do what is good and to avoid what is bad. Living a virtuous life and using your character strengths ensure that your own well-being and that of the people around us improves.
Peterson and Seligman (2004) have done extensive research into these virtues and character strengths and they distinguish six broad categories of virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. The psychological ingredients of these six virtues are the character strengths. These become visible when someone shows certain behavior that others can recognize. For me, that means that other people can also see that I am a grateful person, consider me wise and know that I appreciate beauty.
If you know what your strengths are, you can use them more often. People who use their character strengths in daily life feel happier. Paying attention to the character strengths at work also bears fruit. Researchers have discovered that you are more likely to have positive experiences at work if you use at least four of your character strengths. And it is very inspiring and useful to work with children on their character strengths. Children say that they feel happier and more resilient, and parents tell that the parent-child relationship has been strengthened because of their awareness of character strengths.
You can fill out the Values in Action Strengths Inventory yourself and discover your own character strengths. This questionnaire has 120 statements and at the end you will see your strengths and weaknesses. Are you a coach or do you want to work with character strengths in your own? Then the card game of which you see several cards above, these are in Dutch but also in Englis available, is highly recommended! This card game can be purchased via Amazon. There is also a worldwide Virtues project. This is an international initiative to apply virtues and character strengths, such as honesty, patience and respect, in daily life. Please, leave your character strengths in a comment below and share your experiences with character strengths with us!