Coping During Crisis: An Intervention on Gratitude and Personal Well-Being During COVID-19

. For the current study, we investigated how a gratitude intervention of counterfactual thinking influenced COVID-19 experiences, dispositional gratitude levels, and psychological well-being. College students from a university in the Pacific Northwest (N = 152; Mage = 22.5, SD = 2.6) completed an online survey where they were randomly assigned into either a gratitude treatment group, where they practiced counterfactual thinking, or a control group, where counterfactual thinking was not practiced, and self-reported their COVID-19 experiences, gratitude levels, and psychological well-being. We sought to explore whether counterfactual thinking could mitigate the effects of COVID-19 by increasing gratitude and personal well-being. Statistical analyses indicated that the treatment group exposed to counterfactual thinking reported higher gratitude levels than the control group, t(115) = 2.81, p = .006; t(113) = 3.01, p = .003. A series of Pearson correlations found a small, statistically significant negative relationship between COVID-19 experiences and personal well-being, r(125) = -.23, p = .02. It was found that gratitude and personal well-being were statistically significant and positive, r(125) = .77, p = .001; r(121) = .85, p = .001. Results showed a statistically significant difference between the gratitude control and gratitude treatment groups regarding personal well-being when controlling for the severity of COVID-19 experiences, F(2, 102) = 5.97, p = .004, partial eta squared = .11. This study contributes to existing literature by providing an empirical demonstration that counterfactual thinking can improve gratitude and personal well-being, as well as mitigate negative COVID-19 experiences.