Gratitude Linked to Happiness in Future Teachers, Study Finds

Gratitude may be one of the most reliable psychological resources for happiness, according to a new study of future teachers in Peru. Researchers surveyed 507 education students at a public university in Tacna and found that those who reported higher levels of gratitude also reported higher levels of happiness, with a moderately sized positive association that held across every dimension of wellbeing measured.

The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, focused on students preparing for teaching careers, a population whose psychological adjustment matters both for their own university experience and for the support they will one day provide to children and adolescents. Teacher education combines academic study with preparation for emotionally demanding classrooms, making it a substantively relevant setting for examining the psychological resources that sustain wellbeing.

Participants ranged in age from 18 to 37 years and included 313 women and 194 men drawn from five degree programs across all five academic years. Researchers used a quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional correlational design, assessing gratitude with the Lima Gratitude Scale and happiness with the Lima Happiness Scale. Both instruments are Likert-type questionnaires developed with Peruvian university students, providing contextual grounding for the study.

The Lima Gratitude Scale comprises 18 items grouped into three factors: reciprocity, moral obligation, and sentimental quality. Illustrative items include statements such as “I consider myself a grateful person” and “Acknowledging what we have received is a moral obligation.” The Lima Happiness Scale comprises 27 items grouped into four factors: positive sense of life, life satisfaction, personal fulfillment, and joy of living. Sample items include “I am satisfied with my life” and “Living is wonderful.”

Internal consistency was good for the gratitude scale, with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.807 and model-based omega of 0.823, and excellent for the happiness scale, with alpha of 0.942 and omega of 0.943. These coefficients indicate that the instruments produced reliable measurements in this sample, strengthening confidence in the associations reported.

The central finding was a positive association between gratitude and overall happiness, with Spearman’s rho of 0.447 and a 95% bootstrap confidence interval of 0.368 to 0.519, significant at p < 0.001. Dimension-specific correlations ranged from 0.351 for personal fulfillment to 0.420 for joy of living, with positive sense of life at 0.413 and life satisfaction at 0.372. All five correlations remained significant after Holm adjustment, which controlled the familywise error rate across the family of five tests.

A supplementary unadjusted linear model using standardized scores and HC3 robust standard errors was consistent with these results, yielding a standardized beta of 0.457 and explaining 20.9% of the observed variance in happiness scores. The researchers also conducted a sensitivity analysis, excluding one participant whose single blank response had been reconstructed from internally stored totals, and the overall correlation remained essentially unchanged at 0.448.

The findings align with a broader literature linking gratitude to wellbeing. Previous research has reported strong relationships between gratitude and subjective happiness among engineering students, associations between gratitude and career goal self-efficacy among pre-service teachers in China, and evidence from a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials that gratitude interventions have a significant, albeit small-to-moderate, effect on life satisfaction, positive affect, and happiness. Positive psychology regards gratitude as a character strength that remains highly consistent across time and situations, a stability associated with greater emotional wellbeing.

Theoretical frameworks offer plausible interpretations. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions suggests that gratitude, as a positive emotion, broadens psychological resources and builds social bonds through reciprocity. Students who notice and value support from peers, lecturers, and mentors may evaluate their lives more positively, while meaningful professional goals may provide another connection between gratitude and happiness. Reverse directionality is also plausible: happier students may more readily recognize benefits and express gratitude.

However, the researchers caution that the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference and that the single-institution convenience sample limits generalizability. Recruitment depended on classroom attendance and voluntary participation, which may have introduced selection bias. The analyses did not control for potential confounders such as age, sex, academic year, or program, and the reliability of some gratitude dimensions was weaker than for the overall scale. Longitudinal and multi-institutional studies are needed to determine the temporal direction and broader applicability of these associations.

For teacher education, the findings provide a basis for evaluating gratitude-focused activities as a possible component of broader student support programs. Structured reflection on help received or opportunities to express thanks might be investigated alongside mentorship, coping skills, and access to relevant support resources. Controlled trials are needed to determine whether such activities produce sustained improvements in happiness and offer benefits beyond existing support. The present findings identify an association relevant to student wellbeing; their practical value depends on establishing whether it can inform effective support during teacher preparation.

The statistical approach adopted in the study reflects careful attention to the properties of the data. Because gratitude and happiness scores were not normally distributed, the researchers relied on Spearman’s rho, a rank-based correlation coefficient that captures monotonic relationships without assuming that the variables follow a normal distribution. Bootstrap confidence intervals, generated by repeatedly resampling the data with replacement, provided estimates of the precision of each correlation without depending on parametric assumptions. This combination is well suited to Likert-type questionnaire data, where responses are bounded and often skewed, and it reduces the risk that a single unusual observation drives the apparent association.

The Holm adjustment applied to the p-values addresses a common pitfall in correlational research. When several hypotheses are tested simultaneously, the probability of obtaining at least one spuriously significant result rises with the number of tests. The Holm procedure, a step-down method, controls the familywise error rate while retaining more statistical power than a simple Bonferroni correction. The fact that all five correlations, one for overall happiness and four for its dimensions, survived this adjustment suggests that the gratitude-happiness link is not an artifact of multiple testing, although it does not by itself rule out confounding.

The distinction between the two reliability coefficients reported deserves note. Cronbach’s alpha, the older and more widely cited statistic, depends on assumptions about how items relate to the underlying construct and can underestimate reliability when items are not essentially tau-equivalent. Model-based omega, by contrast, derives from a confirmatory factor model and is generally regarded as a more accurate estimate when items contribute unequally to the construct. The close agreement between alpha and omega for both scales in this study indicates that the instruments behaved consistently regardless of which estimation approach was used, which strengthens confidence in the measurement.

The four dimensions of happiness measured by the Lima Happiness Scale offer a more differentiated picture than a single wellbeing score would. Positive sense of life, defined partly by the relative absence of depression, pessimism, and uneasiness, showed one of the stronger correlations with gratitude, as did joy of living, which captures feeling positive about one’s experiences. Personal fulfillment, tied to emotional tranquility and the pursuit of meaningful goals, showed the weakest but still moderate association. This pattern hints that gratitude may be most closely tied to the affective and experiential facets of happiness rather than to evaluative judgments about goal attainment, though the confidence intervals around these dimension-specific estimates overlap considerably and the differences should not be overinterpreted.

The choice of a Peruvian sample also carries significance for the wider literature. Much of the evidence on gratitude and wellbeing comes from North American, European, and East Asian samples, and definitions of happiness vary across cultural contexts. The definition adopted in the study, drawing on work with Peruvian university students, treats happiness as a subjective, enduring but not permanent state of satisfaction that can arise from material, ethical, or psychological sources and varies with cultural setting. Grounding both measurement instruments in the same population reduces the risk that the observed association reflects translation or construct mismatch, a concern that cross-cultural researchers have repeatedly raised.

The sensitivity analysis concerning the single reconstructed item response illustrates the kind of transparency that strengthens confidence in reported findings. Rather than silently retaining or discarding the participant, the researchers reran the central analysis without that individual and reported the result, which changed the overall correlation only trivially, from 0.447 to 0.448. Such checks are especially valuable in questionnaire research, where missing data handling can otherwise subtly influence estimates.

It is also worth situating the effect size. A correlation of roughly 0.45 is conventionally described as moderate, meaning that gratitude and happiness share meaningful but far from complete variance. Gratitude is plainly not the only determinant of happiness in this population; optimism, interpersonal relationships, and broader social and economic conditions documented in Latin American research on student wellbeing all plausibly contribute. The supplementary linear model, which attributed about a fifth of the variance in happiness to gratitude, is consistent with this reading. The practical implication is that gratitude-focused activities, if they are eventually shown to cause improvements in controlled trials, would likely form one component of broader support programs rather than a stand-alone solution.

Finally, the study’s framing of happiness as an evaluative and affective construct, rather than a diagnostic measure of mental health, guards against overextension. Higher happiness scores should not be read as evidence of the absence of psychological symptoms, nor should the correlation be taken to imply that ungrateful students are unhappy. What the data establish is a robust cross-sectional association in a specific population, measured with locally validated instruments and analyzed with methods appropriate to the data, leaving the questions of causality, temporal direction, and generalizability to future longitudinal and multi-institutional work.

Subject of Research: Gratitude and happiness among university students

Article Title: Gratitude and happiness among university students: a cross-sectional study in teacher education

Article References: Rojas-Moscoso, H. V., Manrique-Rojas, A. O., Velasquez Cutipa, N. N., Zapana-Aguilar, P. V., & Laura-De La Cruz, K. M. (2026). Gratitude and happiness among university students: a cross-sectional study in teacher education. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1974252. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1974252

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1974252

Keywords: gratitude, happiness, university students, teacher education, positive psychology, Peru, cross-sectional study, Frontiers in Psychology, university, students, cross-sectional, teacher