Social Emotions Lab shows the importance of gratitude in health, wellness

Northeastern psychology students working in the Social Emotions Lab seek to understand how greater prosocial behavior can be elicited, using pragmatic studies centered around emotional response. Prosocial behavior, which refers to making decisions and actions that consider the wellbeing of others, has been shown to increase one’s own happiness and lifespan. DeSteno has run the lab since 1999.

“Our main goal is to understand how emotional states shape social, economic and moral decision making,” DeSteno said. “We do that with positive states and negative states, but what we’ve really coalesced around over the past 15 years or so is how emotional states that are moral in their overtones, so things like gratitude and compassion and other feeling states, can shape people’s behavior for the better.”

Jolie Wormwood, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire who obtained her doctorate in psychology at Northeastern in 2012, gave an example of a study conducted in the lab where participants were asked to complete a long, tedious computer task, but just before finishing, the computer would crash. A member of the lab camouflaged as another participant would then offer to retrieve everyone’s data, and the participants’ levels of gratitude would be measured. The results of this particular study indicate that feelings of gratitude are not isolated events, but rather cause a ripple effect of grateful behavior.

“We found that people who were more grateful were more likely to offer help to other people, including not just for a mutually beneficial type of help, but also to novel strangers who we would introduce later on,” Wormwood said.

Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilized social norms and created an atmosphere of unease concerning many social situations, but encouraging findings from the Social Emotions Lab indicate that people have experienced an uptick in gratitude during this trying time.

“COVID, contrary to what you might think, is peaking people’s gratitude levels,” said Shanyu Kates, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in psychology who started working in the lab in 2018. “We’re finding that they’re a lot higher than normal, and that could just be that given the pandemic, it gives you time to reflect and really appreciate all that you have in your life.” 

A large emphasis for the research conducted in the Social Emotions Lab is understanding how people can effectively cultivate happiness and promote positive change on both an individual and societal level. 

“People often care a lot about doing good, but there are ways in which we’re not well attuned to understanding the best ways to do good and make the most impact we can,” said Matthew Coleman, a second-year Ph.D. candidate in psychology who started working in the lab in 2020. “People have all these mistaken intuitions about their own well-being and their own happiness. I’m interested in understanding what these mistakes are and how they can be overcome so that people can make better decisions for improving their own lives.” 

Individuals working in the lab are met with a positive and cooperative atmosphere in which conducting research becomes an exciting endeavor.

“Dave’s lab is truly collaborative and supportive so that no matter whether you’re a volunteer, research assistant, a paid lab manager or a Ph.D. candidate, everyone is working together towards the same goal of doing quality research,” said Lisa Williams, a professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and a Northeastern alum. “At the end of the day, it’s about advancing what we know about emotions.”