Honors Theses
Date of Award
2004
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Stefan Schulenberg
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
Logotherapy, developed by Viktor Frankl, is a philosophy, a personality theory, and a means of treating emotional difficulties and establishing a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Meaning is the attempt to understand how events in life fit into a larger context. Gratitude is a generalized tendency to recognize and respond with appreciative emotion to other people’s benevolence. Gratitude is important to logotherapy because gratitude can be viewed as an attitude that flmctions as a pathway to meaning. Research suggests that both meaning and gratitude are positively linked to well-being and that a lack of meaning is linked to psychopathology. Despite these apparent relationships, there has not been a significant amount of research conducted on how meaning and gratitude relate to one another and to what degree both of these constructs relate to psychopathology. In this study, we examined the relationship between meaning, gratitude, and psychological well-being, as well as added to the psychometric properties of each of the measures used: the Life Attitude Profile-Revised (LAP-R), the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ-6), and the Personality Assessment Screener (PAS). It was hypothesized that meaning and gratitude would both be linked to well-being, with the two also being related to one another such that a lack of meaning and a lack of gratitude are associated with greater degrees of psychopathology. By examining the linear regression equations for the LAP-R and PAS, and the GQ-6 and PAS, the relationship between the variables and the interpretive values of the obtained scores are better understood. Data indicated that meaning and gratitude, and meaning and well-being are statistically related in the predicted direction, and distinct. The relationship between gratitude and psychological well-being is small but statistically significant and in the predicted direction.
Recommended Citation
Cathcart, Natalie Lynn, "A Psychometric Investigation of Measures of Meaning, Gratitude, and Psychological Health" (2004). Honors Theses. 2187.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/2187
Accessibility Status
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