Positive Responses to Benefit and Harm: Bringing Forgiveness and Gratitude into Cognitive Psychotherapy

Forgiveness and gratitude represent positive psychological responses to interpersonal harms and benefits that individuals have experienced. In the present article we first provide a brief review of the research that has shown forgiveness and gratitude to be related to various measures of physical and psychological well-being. We then review the empirical findings regarding the cognitive and affective substrates of forgiveness and gratitude. We also offer a selective review of some of the interventions that appear to be effective in encouraging forgiveness and gratitude. To conclude, we suggest some ways in which the insights from the basic research on promoting forgiveness and gratitude might be meaningfully integrated into cognitive psychotherapy. Keywords: forgiveness; gratitude; well-being; cognitive psychotherapy; interpersonal Recently psychologists have reached a consensus that research has seriously neglected the strengths of human behavior (Fredrickson, 1998; McCullough & Snyder, 2000; Myers & Diener, 1995; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Taylor, 2001 ). They argue that, instead of articulating the positive experiences that improve quality of life, many theories in psychology have focused mainly on curbing aggression, reducing psychopathologies, and controlling vices. Positive psychology is a response to this perceived oversight. An area in which positive psychology might be applied successfully to cognitive psychotherapy is in the area of people's responses to other people's treatment of them. How should people respond when they are treated particularly well-or particularly poorly by others? Theorists of cognitive psychotherapy have had much to say about people's maladaptive responses to such interpersonal behavior (e.g., anger), but have had surprisingly little to say about positive responses to such behavior. In this domain, positive psychology may have much to offer: By helping people to respond more positively when others harm them and to better savor the interpersonal situations in which others are benevolent toward them, people may be able to gain resources for psychological well-being that would go untapped otherwise. The major reasons for the current success of cognitive psychotherapy are that: (a) identification and modification of specific cognitive processes associated with desired therapeutic outcomes have helped produce effective treatments; (b) such treatments have been consistently replicated by cognitive therapists; and (c) such treatments have yielded effects that are not only beneficial but appealing to clients who are increasingly seeking rational ways of directly improving their lives (Leahy, 2002). In this spirit, gratitude and forgiveness may also be useful additions to the armamentarium of cognitive psychotherapists. We now have a clear picture of the basic mechanisms underlying both phenomena, the reasons they are beneficial for people, practical applications for facilitating them, and we also know that the practice of forgiveness and gratitude are tools that clients can employ beyond the treatment context to directly improve their lives. Forgiveness is a positive psychological response to interpersonal harm, and gratitude is a positive psychological response to interpersonal benefits. Despite the fact that forgiveness and gratitude have been viewed as perennial human concerns in many ancient theories of the good life (Emmons & McCullough, 2003b; McCullough & Worthington, 1999), psychologists have only recently begun to explore the applications of forgiveness and gratitude to the promotion of human welfare. The present article addresses these two areas of research in positive psychology. Specifically, we first review the empirical research on forgiveness, including research on its links to health and well-being, basic research on cognitive and affective factors that encourage or deter forgiveness, and research on the effectiveness of forgiveness interventions. …