The Relationship of Gratitude Writing Experience with Threat Perception and Future Anxiety in the Corona Process

The aim of the project is to test the effects of situational gratitude, activated through grateful personality structure and experimental interventions, on future anxiety and whether these effects are mediated by realistic and symbolic threats due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In this direction, two separate studies, one relational and the other experimental, were conducted. The findings obtained within the scope of the project indicated that the grateful personality structure negatively predicted future anxieties, in other words, as the participants' gratitude tendencies increased, their future anxiety decreased (Study 1). In a context where COVID-19 continues, it has been observed that keeping a list of experiences for which one is grateful or grateful is not enough to focus on the positive aspects of life and probably therefore does not reduce their negative thoughts and feelings such as anxiety about the future (Study 2). Perceived symbolic and realistic threats due to COVID-19 could not mediate the relationship between gratitude and future anxiety in both studies. More precisely, neither the gratitude disposition nor the situational gratitude activated by outside intervention could influence perceived threats due to COVID-19, which in turn did not allow gratitude to influence future anxiety through these threats. The findings showed that in the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the grateful personality pattern can predict the reduction in future anxiety. However, by showing that gratitude writing practices do not reduce future anxiety, he pointed out that these practices may not produce positive results for everyone and under all circumstances, and that gratitude writing practices alone may not weaken the effect of subjective malaise without providing positive emotion and life experience. When the findings and participant feedback are evaluated together, it can be argued that in extraordinary circumstances such as the COVID-19 epidemic, asking people to write a large number of gratitude experiences may not be beneficial and may even cause harm depending on individual differences. Therefore, it may be advisable to show flexibility to allow everyone to write as many experiences as they want, rather than having people write many or fixed amounts of gratitude experiences, especially in challenging extraordinary circumstances. In this way, it is thought that people will only have the opportunity to write about experiences they are truly grateful for, and they will be more likely to experience positive awareness as a result.