Gratitude as a trait: what the six-item GQ-6 measures

Two people get the same small favour, a colleague who covers a shift for them. One still mentions it a week later. The other forgot it by the evening. Neither is a bad person, but they differ in something psychologists call the grateful disposition, a lasting tendency to notice the good things other people and life bring you, and to feel thankful for them.

In 2002 Michael McCullough, Robert Emmons and Jo-Ann Tsang published a short questionnaire to measure that tendency, the Gratitude Questionnaire, six-item form (GQ-6). Our Gratitude Questionnaire GQ-6 test uses its six statements.

What the six statements ask

Four statements describe gratitude directly, for example "I have so much in life to be thankful for." and "I am grateful to a wide variety of people." Two describe its absence: "When I look at the world, I don't see much to be grateful for." and "Long amounts of time can pass before I feel grateful to something or someone." Those two are scored in reverse, so agreeing with them lowers your score.

You answer each statement on a seven-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, the same format as the original.

Four facets from six items

McCullough and his colleagues described four ways in which grateful people differ from others. Intensity is how strongly you feel thankful when something good happens. Frequency is how often you feel it in an ordinary day. Span is how many areas of life you feel thankful for, such as family, work, health or simply being alive. Density is how many people you feel grateful to for a single good outcome.

Our result shows a score for each of these four facets. The authors scored the GQ-6 as one total, and with six items each facet here rests on one or two statements. Read the four scores as a rough pattern, and treat the overall picture as the more reliable part of your result.

What higher scores go with

In the 2002 paper, people with higher GQ-6 scores reported more life satisfaction and optimism and less depression and envy. Their friends also tended to describe them as grateful, so the score was not only how people liked to see themselves.

These are correlations. They do not show that gratitude causes wellbeing. People who are already doing well may find it easier to feel thankful.

Can you practise gratitude?

In 2003 Emmons and McCullough asked students to write a short weekly list for ten weeks. One group wrote things they were grateful for, another wrote daily hassles, a third wrote neutral events. The gratitude group rated their lives more positively, felt more optimistic about the coming week and reported fewer physical complaints.

Later work has made the picture more modest. In 2016 Davis and colleagues pooled studies of gratitude exercises and found that they helped compared with doing nothing, but the difference was small when they were compared with other pleasant activities. A gratitude list is a reasonable habit to try. It is unlikely to change your life on its own.

If you want to try it, keep it specific. "My neighbour helped me carry the shopping" gives you more to notice than "I am grateful for my family".

Gratitude often goes together with a hopeful view of the future, which the optimism test (LOT) measures. For a broader look at how happy you are as a person, read the Subjective Happiness Scale post.