The Effect of Gratitude on Psychological and Subjective Well-being among Hospital Staff

Currently, mental health is especially important in some occupations with harsh work conditions requiring strong personal and mental capacities. Occupations related to health care are among such occupations. Therefore, psychological and subjective well-being is especially important in personnel working in the healthcare sector. We aimed to assess whether gratitude training affects psychological and subjective well-being in hospital personnel. In this semi-experimental study with pre-test and post-test, 70 personnel aged 21-46 years working in clinical and administrative sections of 5 hospitals affiliated to Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran, were enrolled. The participants were randomly divided into intervention and control groups using block randomization. Then, the participants in the intervention group had 10 group sessions of 90 minutes of gratitude training. Ryff‟s Scale of Psychological Well Being, Subjective Happiness Scale, Satisfaction with Life Scale, Gratitude Questionnaire-6, and a Gratitude training package was used for data collection. According to our result, we found no significant difference between the mean scores of psychological well-being, domains of psychological well-being, subjective well-being, and gratitude between the two groups at baseline and gratitude training significantly affected all domains of psychological well-being (except for autonomy) and subjective well-being. This study demonstrated that Gratitude training is effective in enhancing psychological well-being and subjective well-being.

Keywords:

Gratitude , Psychological well-being , Subjective well-being