Browsing by Subject "gratitude"
Now showing items 1-4 of 4
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(2021)It is a common practice for authors of an academic work to thank the anonymous reviewers at the journal that is publishing it. Allegedly, scholars thank the reviewers because their comments improved the paper and thanking them is a proper way to show gratitude to them. Yet often, a paper that is eventually accepted by one journal is first rejected by other journals, and even though those journals' reviewers also supply comments that improve the quality of the work, those reviewers are not customarily thanked. We contacted prominent scholars in bioethics and philosophy of medicine and asked whether thanking such reviewers would be a welcome trend. Having received responses from 107 scholars, we discuss the suggested proposal in light of both philosophical argument and the results of this survey. We argue that when an author's work is published, the author should thank the reviewers whose comments improved the paper regardless of whether those reviewers' journals rejected or accepted the work. That is because scholars should show gratitude to those who deserve it, and those whose comments improved the paper deserve gratitude. We also consider objections against this practice raised by scholars and show why they are not entirely persuasive.
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(2019)Over the past two decades, gratitude as a scientific topic has been growing in interest. Little is known about its importance in educational environments and classroom interactions. The present article offers an account of a qualitative study that identifies gratitude as a moral value and uses stimulated recall methodology to explore the experience of gratitude in a school environment. Two first-grade teachers from an urban area of Finland were recorded during normal lessons. Deductive and inductive content analyses of a total of 26 critical incidents were conducted to explore expressions of gratitude and the reasons for them. The data shows that teacher-student relationships, material benefits, class routines and self-sufficiency are reasons to experience gratitude. Also, verbal, concrete and connective expressions of gratitude in classroom interactions were identified. The study contributes to the sparse knowledge about gratitude in school environments and provides important insights for understanding the phenomenon in this specific context.
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(2018)Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects-social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying 'thank you in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, service or support from another, comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents. We find that expressions of gratitude in these episodes are remarkably rare, suggesting that social reciprocity in everyday life relies on tacit understandings of rights and duties surrounding mutual assistance and collaboration. At the same time, we also find minor cross-cultural variation, with slightly higher rates in Western European languages English and Italian, showing that universal tendencies of social reciprocity should not be equated with more culturally variable practices of expressing gratitude. Our study complements previous experimental and culture-specific research on gratitude with a systematic comparison of audiovisual corpora of naturally occurring social interaction from different cultures from around the world.
