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Personal narratives offer a deep look at how gratitude functions in everyday life.

Grateful stories are marked by four themes: gifts, grace, givers, and generosity.

Intentionally weaving the four Gs into the stories you tell can help cultivate gratitude.

How do you tell if you’re a truly grateful person?

To study individual differences in gratitude, researchers typically use self-report rating scales, of which the best-known is the six-item Gratitude Questionnaire, or GQ-6. Participants rate statements on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Responses are then summed, with higher scores indicating higher levels of gratitude.

I admire the GQ-6’s elegance and brevity and have used it in my own research. But it may have difficulty distinguishing among people at the grateful end of the spectrum. Across several studies, participants have reported scores clustered near the top of the scale. In one study of U.S. professionals, the average GQ-6 score was 38.50, within a theoretical range of 6 to 42. That’s an average response of about 6.4 on a 7-point scale.

Maybe many people really are very grateful. But high scores could also reflect people’s tendency to engage in socially desirable responding when completing the GQ-6. That is, many people think of gratitude as a desirable trait to have, and previous research has shown that their responses to the GQ-6 partially reflect their attempt to describe themselves in especially favorable terms.

This doesn’t mean the GQ-6 is invalid. But questionnaires may not tell the whole story.

The Stories You Tell Yourself and Others

If I want a richer picture of how gratitude operates in your life, I’d invite you to tell me stories about your life. I wouldn’t necessarily ask for a story that demonstrates gratitude. Instead, I might ask you to describe a memorable incident from the past week, the........

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