New psychology research links gratitude development to lower adolescent depression

A new study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology suggests that adolescents who become more grateful over time are less likely to experience depression—especially when their gratitude boosts their self-esteem. The research tracked hundreds of middle school students in China and found that distinct patterns in how gratitude developed over time were closely linked with levels of depression.

The researchers set out to explore a key question: How do changes in gratitude during middle school affect a young person’s mental health? While many previous studies have shown that gratitude and depression are related, most of that work relied on snapshots taken at a single point in time.

Few studies have looked at how gratitude changes during adolescence—a period of life marked by emotional growth, academic pressure, and social challenges. Even fewer have examined how self-esteem might influence the connection between gratitude and depression over time. The new study aimed to fill that gap by following students across three points over two years, beginning in eighth grade and ending in ninth grade.

“As researchers in psychology, we were inspired to explore factors that could affect adolescent mental health,” said study author Liuyue Huang, a researcher affiliated with the Department of Psychology and the Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, at the University of Macau

“The emergence of positive psychology offered a valuable perspective, shifting the focus from merely treating mental illness to fostering strengths like gratitude. We saw gratitude as a promising, modifiable factor to enhance well-being and resilience during the critical developmental stage of adolescence.”

For their study, supervised by Professor Peilian Chi, the researchers recruited 660 students from two middle schools in Guangzhou, China. Participants were around 13 years old at the start of the study. Of the original group, 564 students completed all three waves of data collection. At each point, students completed well-established questionnaires measuring their levels of gratitude, self-esteem, and depression.

Gratitude was measured using a six-item scale that asked students how often they felt thankful for people and experiences in their lives. Self-esteem was assessed with the widely used Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and depression symptoms were evaluated using a brief version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. The researchers also collected information on students’ gender, age, and overall life satisfaction to account for these influences in their analysis.

Using a statistical method designed to identify patterns of change over time, the researchers uncovered four distinct “trajectories” of gratitude. These groups differed both in the starting levels of gratitude and in how gratitude changed over the two-year span.

The largest group (about 36 percent of participants) showed consistently low gratitude levels across all time points and was labeled the “low-gratitude-persistence” group. A second group, making up nearly 30 percent of students, started with high gratitude and continued to increase slightly over time—these students belonged to the “high-gratitude-increasing” group.

Another group, comprising about 24 percent, started with high gratitude but showed a decline, labeled the “high-gratitude-declined” group. The final group, about 11 percent of participants, began with low gratitude but improved significantly by the end of the study—this was the “low-gratitude-improving” group.

The researchers then looked at how these patterns related to depression in the final year of middle school. They found that students in the two increasing-gratitude groups—both those who started high and increased, and those who started low but improved—reported significantly lower depression scores than students in the low-gratitude-persistence group.

In contrast, students whose gratitude declined over time did not differ in depression levels from those with persistently low gratitude. This suggests that both the level and the direction of change in gratitude matter for adolescent mental health. Merely starting out with high gratitude did not protect students from depression if their gratitude declined during this critical period.

“We were surprised that the ‘High-gratitude-declined’ group—those who started with high gratitude but saw it drop—didn’t show a lower risk of depression compared to the consistently low-gratitude group,” Huang told PsyPost. “This suggests that maintaining high or increasing gratitude over time might be more critical for mental health than just having high gratitude at one point, highlighting the importance of sustained positive development rather than a fixed state.”

Self-esteem turned out to play a key role in these relationships. When researchers examined whether changes in self-esteem could explain the link between gratitude and depression, they found strong evidence that it did. Students whose gratitude improved—either from a high or low starting point—tended to show increases in self-esteem, which in turn predicted lower levels of depression.

In fact, once self-esteem was accounted for, the direct relationship between gratitude trajectory and depression disappeared, suggesting that gratitude protects against depression mainly by supporting adolescents’ self-worth.

“Our study shows that developing gratitude in adolescents can significantly lower the risk for depression, with self-esteem playing a key role in this process,” Huang explained. “For parents and educators, this means encouraging gratitude practices could be a practical and effective way to support adolescents’ mental health, especially during middle school years when emotional challenges often peak.”

These findings support what psychologists call the “broaden-and-build” theory, which suggests that positive emotions like gratitude help people build psychological resources that can buffer them against stress and negative feelings. In this case, the resource being built is self-esteem.

At the same time, the researchers acknowledge several limitations. All data came from self-report questionnaires, which can be influenced by how participants interpret the questions or how they want to present themselves. The study focused only on students from a specific region in China, so the findings may not apply to adolescents in other cultural or educational contexts. Additionally, the researchers only examined one possible mechanism—self-esteem—leaving open the possibility that other psychological or environmental factors may also influence how gratitude affects depression.

Nevertheless, the study’s strengths—including its relatively large sample size, repeated measurements, and attention to patterns over time—make it an important contribution to understanding adolescent well-being. Future research could expand by including more diverse populations, exploring other potential mediators such as social support or coping skills, and testing interventions that directly aim to boost gratitude and self-esteem.

“We’d like to note that gratitude is a dynamic resource that can be cultivated with practice, and its benefits ripple through self-esteem to improve mental health,” Huang said. “We encourage readers to try small gratitude exercises with the teens in their lives, like keeping a gratitude journal, and to see this as a proactive step toward building resilience in a world full of challenges.”

The study, “Sowing seeds of gratitude: the effect of the trajectories of Adolescents’ gratitude on depression and the mediating role of self-esteem,” was authored by Liuyue Huang, Shan Zhao, Yixiao Shi, Liutong Ou, Hongfei Du, and Peilian Chi.